AUSTRIA’s new 130km Koralm Railway opened to all traffic on December 14, with passenger trains running between Graz and Klagenfurt in as little as 41 minutes.
Within the first few hours of opening to passenger trains, 10,000 people had travelled on the new line. Test trains started running earlier this year, followed by the opening of the Koralm Railway to freight traffic last month.
Construction of the €6.1bn project has taken place in several phases, with initial work, including quadrupling of the existing main line south of Graz, starting in 2002. Major construction, such as the early stages of the 33km Koralm Tunnel, started in 2008.
The 250km/h line, one of Europe’s longest-running rail projects, is electrified throughout at the Austrian standard of 15kV ac and is a key link in one of the European Union’s (EU) nine TEN-T corridors. Austria is located in the middle of the Baltic-Adriatic corridor connecting ports in Poland to the north with ports in Italy, Slovenia and Croatia to the south, and the new is an important route for transit freight.
The Koralm Railway has around 50km of tunnels, more than 100 bridges and 23 stations and stops.
"The full opening of the Koralm Railway is a historic milestone,” says Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) CEO, Andreas Matthä. “We are experiencing enormous interest in the new line.”
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