About this journey

Schwarzach-St. Veit station sits at the northern foot of the High Tauern range, where the Tauern Railway begins its climb into the Central Eastern Alps. Construction of that line grew out of the k.k. Railway Ministry's 'New Alpine Railways' programme from 1901 onwards, and the northern ramp from Schwarzach-St. Veit followed from 1902. The line was completed in 1909 and inaugurated by Emperor Franz Joseph I at Spittal station on 5 July that year. Its centrepiece is the 8,371 m Tauern Tunnel, which crosses the Alpine crest on a maximum incline of 2.5%. The railway was fully electrified between 1933 and 1935 on the 15 kV 16.7 Hz AC system shared across Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

At Bischofshofen the route transfers onto the Enns Valley Railway, which continues east to Selzthal. This eastern section follows the Enns river valley through the Alps, eventually approaching the Leoben area, where the underlying rail infrastructure dates to an opening on 1 September 1868 by the Austrian Southern Railway Company. Since 1998, the 5,460 m Galgenberg tunnel has replaced an older alignment on the approach toward that part of the network. The journey from Schwarzach-St. Veit to Selzthal spans two historically distinct railways, moving from the grand engineering of the early twentieth-century Tauern crossing to the older valley route of the Enns.