Southern Railway (Austria)


The Southern Railway is a railway in Austria that runs from Vienna to Graz and the border with Slovenia at Spielfeld via Semmering and Bruck an der Mur. It is a part of the Austrian Southern Railway that connected Vienna with Trieste, the main seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, via Ljubljana. A main obstacle in its construction was getting over the Semmering Pass over the Northern Limestone Alps. The twin-track, electrified section that runs through the current territory of Austria is owned and operated by Austrian Federal Railways and is one of the major lines in the country.

History

While the connection between Vienna and Graz, partly provided by ÖBB Railjet high-speed trains, is busy, international passenger traffic to Trieste has decreased in past decades. Nevertheless, the railway is to be developed by the Semmering Base Tunnel and the Koralm Railway branch-off to Klagenfurt, Carinthia. The section from Graz to the Slovenian border, which had been downgraded to a single track railway in the 1950s, is currently again enlarged to double track.
Within the Vienna metropolitan region, the sections between new Vienna Central Station, Wien Meidling, Mödling, Leobersdorf and Wiener Neustadt Hauptbahnhof are also part of the suburban Vienna S-Bahn railway network.
During the Cold War trade between Vienna and Trieste was mainly run through Tarvisio in Italy which tracks had been equipped with electric power by 1963; the same for the branch from Vienna into Graz and Yugoslavia by 1966.