Rail route of the month: through the Alps to the Adriatic – Vienna to Trieste

Our slow travel expert finds the perfect excursion for winter days when daylight hours are short, leaving the Austrian capital just after dawn and reaching the Adriatic port at dusk

Vienna is Europe’s best-connected capital city, at least in terms of rail links. Weekly direct services to Minsk and Monaco slipped from the departure boards during the pandemic, but new services over the past couple of years include direct trains to Paris, Amsterdam, Genoa, Split and Trieste.

As the Habsburg empire’s main Adriatic seaport, Trieste had good rail services to Vienna, but after the first world war, politics and geography conspired against it, leaving the city on a finger of land only tenuously connected to the rest of Italy. For decades Trieste was what the late Jan Morris described as “an allegory of limbo”, and a railway backwater.