About this journey

The journey departs from Wien Hauptbahnhof, Vienna's central through-station, which became fully operational in December 2015 after replacing two former terminus stations that had stood at right-angles to one another. Formally inaugurated on 10 October 2014, the station was built at a total cost of around 987 million euros, financed by ÖBB, the city authorities, the European Union, and property development. Its five island platforms — ten platform faces in all — sit beneath striking canopies roughly 210 metres in length, and the design incorporated around 100 km of new track along with around 300 switches and crossings.

From this engineered gateway the line heads east across the Austrian lowlands toward the Slovak border, covering a route that connects two national capitals. The destination is Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, reached after a journey of just over an hour. What begins in the architecture of a major European interchange resolves at a neighbouring capital, the two cities sitting closer together than almost any other pair of national capitals on the continent — though that proximity makes the contrast between Vienna's vast new terminus and the approach into Bratislava all the more legible from the driver's cab.