About this journey

Zagreb Glavni kolodvor, the largest station in Croatia and the main hub of the Croatian Railways network, was designed by Hungarian architect Ferenc Pfaff and opened on 18 August 1892, financed by the Hungarian State Railways (MÁV). Its Neoclassical reception building stretches 186.5 m along the southern edge of the city centre and is a protected cultural monument of Croatia. The station's construction followed the opening of the continuous railway line between Budapest and Rijeka in 1873, which brought a rapid expansion of rail traffic converging on Zagreb.

From Zagreb, the route runs southeast toward the Slovenian border at Dobova, tracing a corridor with a long history: between 1919 and 1977 this was the path of the Orient Express. Today the line forms part of Pan-European Corridor X, connecting Salzburg through Ljubljana and Zagreb toward Skopje and Thessaloniki. At Dobova station, where Croatia hands over to Slovenia, the Croatian M101 line meets the Slovenian network. The electrification changes here as well — 25 kV AC on the Croatian side gives way to 3 kV DC beyond Dobova toward Ljubljana. The journey thus moves from an imperial Austro-Hungarian terminus, unchanged in its monumental outline for well over a century, to one of Europe's significant railway boundary points where infrastructure, voltage, and national jurisdiction all shift within a single station.