Vienna to Trieste - Part 1 Great Continental Railway Journeys

I'm embarking on a new railway adventure

that will take me across the heart of Europe.

I'll be using this, my Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide,

dated 1913, which opened up an exotic world of foreign travel

for the British tourist.

It told travellers where to go, what to see and how to navigate

the thousands of miles of tracks crisscrossing the continent.

Now, a century later, I'm using my copy to reveal an era

of great optimism and energy, where technology, industry,

science and the arts were flourishing.

I want to rediscover that lost Europe that in 1913 couldn't know

that its way of life would shortly be swept aside by the advent of war.

On this journey, I'm following my guidebook

through part of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire

that in 1913 stretched from Italy in the west to Russia in the east,

where the border between the two empires extended over 500 miles.

Were I travelling a century ago, this train would be carrying me

to the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

a hotchpotch of nationalities that could sing the Imperial Anthem

in 17 different languages.

Bradshaw's tells me that it's presided over by Francis Josef I,

"..a very old and old-fashioned emperor."

I shall travel on the very first transalpine railway,

an iron artery that connected the imperial capital

to its Adriatic port.

Franz Josef's family, the Habsburgs,

had reigned over lands in Europe for seven centuries,

but the Austro-Hungarian emperor's outdated rule was under challenge

from modernisers and nationalisms.

I'll be travelling along the first major trunk railway

to be built in the empire.

I begin in the Austrian capital of Vienna,

from where I'll travel south-west,

crossing the Alps through the awe-inspiring Semmering Pass.

My journey continues south to Graz, Austria's second city,

crosses into Slovenia and on to its capital Ljubljana

and from there I'll travel

the last 60 miles into Italy

and my final stop,

the port of Trieste.

Along the way, I'll learn that the empire,

when confronted by change, fought to hold on to its past.

Not everybody likes it when a new world begins.

A new world beginning means an old world ends.

I'll be attempting an Edwardian-style winter sports challenge.

HE CHEERS

And I'll travel along one of the world's

most impressive feats of railway engineering.

No tunnel drilling machines, so they had to drill the holes by hand.

It's a handmade railway line.

At the time of my guidebook,

the Habsburgs had already been forced to compromise with Hungary,

their largest and most rebellious territory.

For the preceding half-century, Franz Josef had reigned as a dual monarch.

Hungary had its own parliament in Budapest,

but the empire's first city was undoubtedly the Austrian capital.

"Vienna," says Bradshaw's, "is regarded as one of the brightest

"and healthiest of the large continental cities,

"with cheerful and courteous inhabitants."

The number of its citizens had quintupled

since the middle of the 19th century,

and its Jewish population had risen 35 times over.

Whilst its imperial port was perhaps the most hidebound

and reactionary in Europe, Vienna had attracted masses of migrants

who defied tradition with their new music, art and ideas.

With the formation of the dual monarchy in 1867

had come new civil rights, enabling minorities to move more freely

to cities to seek new opportunities.

Around the date of my Bradshaw's,

trains were bringing in Jewish, Slav and Czech migrants

from all corners of the empire.

Vienna has this most impressive new central railway station,

the Hauptbahnhof.

Over the last few years, four billion euros have been invested here,

and from a single station, you'll be able to travel

east and west and north and south.

Bucharest and Budapest and Rome and Berlin,

from a single station.

When Edwardian tourists came here,

they found a city newly rebuild according to the will of the emperor.

In 1857, Franz Josef had personally ordered that the medieval walls

be razed to the ground

to make space for a grand imperial capital with magnificent buildings

designed by the empire's leading architects.

This is the Ringstrasse, which Bradshaw's tells me is,

"..a fine, broad thoroughfare.

"Within this district are most of the principal buildings."

This is imperial Vienna - the city of pomp and elegance and etiquette,

of balls and opera.

But by 1913, there was a different city.

It was audacious, rebellious and modern.

The values represented by these edifices of tradition

and dynastic power were being shaken to their foundations.

I'm meeting historian Philipp Blom

outside Austria's National Theatre, built in 1888.

-Philipp, hello.

-Welcome to Vienna.

Thank you.

How would you describe the state of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by 1913?

Well, it was a difficult time.

It was a time when everything was really trying to break apart,

or threatening to break apart,

and people were desperately trying to keep it together,

so the emperor was trying to keep it together,

but basically, it's a medieval empire in a modern Europe.

This is a place where facades,

where appearances are tremendously important

because only the appearance of unity really makes this one empire.

At the turn of the 20th century,

governing 50 million inhabitants from 15 nations was proving impossible.

With different groups clamouring for equality,

nationalism was on the rise and the empire's integrity was under threat.

Philipp is taking me to the Prater Park, mentioned in my guide,

to ride on the world-famous Prater Wheel.

It was built by British engineer Walter Bassett in 1897.

-Our very own sitting room!

-Oh, wonderful.

And soon to be a sitting room in the skies.

And off we go.

Wonderful!

In fact, this Ferris wheel was already here

-by the end of the empire, wasn't it?

-Well, yes.

Your tourists would have been able to ride on it

and it was said to be a bit like imperial politics, you know?

There's always movement and you always end up where you were before.

Whilst the politics may have been going round in circles,

Vienna's cultural life, led by its Jewish population,

was challenging Viennese values and breaking down its social barriers.

This was an extraordinary period for the arts in Vienna

and for scientific progress, wasn't it?

There was an explosion of creativity, that is true.

And you have got writers like Arthur Schnitzler who really

observed people's identities and crept into their soul.

You, of course, had Sigmund Freud who did the same thing

in a therapeutic context.

You have painters like Schiele and Klimt.

So I think, you know, the questioning of everything,

the questioning of identity

and tradition in a city that is burgeoning

and really bursting at the seams, that was something very important

and that's what we call Viennese Modernism.

There would be a reaction against modernism.

Was that associated with anti-Semitism?

Well, it was, because not everybody likes it when a new world begins.

A new world beginning means an old world ends.

This anti-modernism

especially influenced the city's Austrian middle class,

among them, a young Adolf Hitler who dreamed of studying art here.

By 1913, both capital and empire faced an uncertain future.

I'm heading back onto solid ground, from where I can contemplate

this iconic landmark which features in one of my favourite movies.

Ever since I saw that Orson Welles film, The Third Man,

I've thought of Vienna as the centre of Cold War intrigue.

But in 1913, it was the setting for a real-life spy drama.

I'm on the trail of an event that 100 years ago

sent shock waves around Europe.

I'm meeting military historian Colonel Christian Ortner

at Vienna's central post office.

Hello, Christian. I'm Michael.

Nice to meet you.

Christian, I believe that in 1913,

the Austro-Hungarian army was rocked by a spy scandal.

How did it come to light?

Yes, it was really a big catastrophe,

especially for the Austro-Hungarian army

because it all started

when a few letters here in this post office were not collected.

They were sent back to a tiny, little village

near the German-Russian border,

well-known to be one of the spy centres of the area.

And there, the German secret service realised,

"Hmm, some letters are coming."

They opened them and money was in it.

-A lot of money?

-A lot of money.

And then they informed the Austrian military secret service...

"There could be some problems within your army."

The envelope full of cash also contained addresses

linked to Russian intelligence.

It looked as though the Austro-Hungarian secret service

had a mole.

A copy of the letter was sent back to the post office

and whoever collected it would be exposed as the traitor.

Three civil detectives were here, waiting,

and a female worker here had a bell

and when the letter was collected, she should ring the bell

and the three detectives realised, oh, that's the man.

So presumably they followed?

Yes, they did and this was a very interesting story

because when following, the man took a taxi.

This is the decisive point of the whole investigation.

Detectives had staked out the post office for six weeks.

If they wanted to catch the traitor, they had to close the net fast.

Fearing that they'd lost their man,

the detectives waited for the taxi driver to return to the rank

and learned that the suspect had gone to a central hotel.

They also discovered that he'd dropped the sheath

of a letter opener on the back seat.

So the detectives have the sheath of a knife

-and they have an address, a hotel.

-Yes.

-What do they do?

Quite interesting.

They gave the sheath of the knife to the concierge,

because it was clear that maybe some of the guests was the real owner.

And, er, they were waiting in the lobby room

and suddenly a man came down and said this is his sheath.

It was Colonel Redl,

a high-ranking officer of the former military secret service.

My goodness. That must have been a huge shock.

Colonel Alfred Redl was being blackmailed by the Russians

over his homosexuality

and was supplying them with Austrian military secrets.

Interrogators assembled

and went up to his hotel room to extract the truth.

-Did he confess?

-Yes, he confessed immediately.

And later on, he was handed over a pistol and in the morning

of the 25th of May, they found him dead in his room.

He had shot himself.

What was the impact of this scandal on Austro-Hungary?

This was an enormous scandal

and I think it was an earthquake to the empire.

In a bid to repair the damage done to the military's reputation

and to improve morale, Emperor Franz Josef appointed his nephew

and heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, inspector general of the army.

It was while visiting troops in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo in 1914

that Franz Ferdinand was assassinated

and Europe was plunged into the First World War.

Ending my day, I'm drawn to an aspect of this city

that no early 20th-century tourist would have ignored.

Vienna's extraordinary musical heritage of Mozart, Schubert

and Strauss had been central to its culture for over 200 years.

But in 1913, a new sound caused uproar in the city's concert hall.

I'm at the stunning National Library to meet Professor Susana Zapke.

Susana, what are these?

We have here the newspapers that tell the story

of the Skandalkonzert on the 31st March, 1913.

-The Skandalkonzert?

-Skandalkonzert, yes. A big event in Vienna.

The concert was conducted by avant-garde composer

Arnold Schoenberg, and featured new works by other emerging modernists.

For the traditional audience, they'd gone too far.

Did people begin to whistle or to boo or what happened?

And to laugh and to cry and to gesticulate.

-It was a moment absolutely of high tension.

-Did it come to blows?

Oh, yes. It came to blows.

And therefore, in Vienna, we speak not about the Skandalkonzert

but about the Slapkonzert.

-So it was a clash of the old and the new?

-Absolutely.

They were absolutely aggressive to this new form of music,

this modernity.

Which do you prefer to play?

Straus, but I think if you play music from your heart,

it doesn't matter which kind of music you play.

Do you think people in Vienna now accept Schoenberg

in the way that they accept Straus?

-No. Not really.

-SHE LAUGHS

-It's still considered rather new?

-Yes. Yeah.

I'm leaving the capital behind and following my guidebook 60 miles

south-west towards some of Austria's most breathtaking scenery.

I have, of course, the most enormous admiration

for British railway engineers,

but let's face it, they didn't have to cope with the Alps.

I'm going to take this train through the mighty Semmering Pass.

And as I make that epic journey, I'm going to be thinking

about the man who lived for that idea and the many who died for it.

WHISTLE BLOWS

The Semmering Pass is Europe's first transalpine railway.

It forms part of the 300-mile long Vienna to Trieste line,

which was the empire's spinal cord through the mountains.

I've arranged to meet railway historian Gunter Dinhobl on board.

-Hello, Gunter.

-Hi, Michael.

-Nice to meet you.

-Very good to see you.

Why was it so important for the Habsburg Empire

to build this railway line?

I think the most important thing was to get a good transport connection

from Vienna, the capital of the empire, to Trieste,

the main harbour, the main port of the empire,

and at this time, to get the opening of the world.

The emperor wanted Austria-Hungary's main seaport

to rival Genoa and Marseilles.

Plans for a line were discussed as early as 1837,

but the treacherous alpine route

prevented them from becoming a reality.

So suddenly, Gunter, I feel that the train is beginning to move up

a steep gradient.

You can feel it pulling as it goes around the very tight curves

and, of course, the scenery has become very alpine.

Beautiful.

How big a challenge was it

to build the railway line through the Semmering?

I was a really huge challenge because in the time before,

no-one tried to build a railway in such a mountainous area or so steep.

Who was the brain behind the railway?

Karl Ghega, who was born in Venice,

studied mechanical engineering, mathematics,

also studied architecture and he was designated to be the chief engineer

for the whole railway line from Vienna to Trieste.

Karl von Ghega was brought onto the project in 1842.

He immediately began to survey the area

and to study systems abroad to try to overcome to alpine obstacle.

In 1848, construction of the ambitious line began.

It would involve 22 major bridges, 16 viaducts and 14 tunnels.

There had been around 15,000 to 20,000 people

working on the 42km long railway line.

Dynamite didn't exist at that time, no tunnel drilling machines,

so they had to drill the holes by hand.

-It's a handmade railway line.

-An extraordinary achievement.

700 men and women died building the line. It took six years to complete.

And in 1854, the first passenger train puffed over the Semmering Pass.

Now UNESCO protected, it's as awe-inspiring today

as it would have been for tourists following my 1913 guide.

I often say to people, if there's one thing that's more beautiful

than a green valley, it's a green valley with a railway viaduct in it.

Indeed. You'll see it on the Semmering.

Auf Wiedersehen.

What a beautiful alpine station and wonderful, fresh -

not to say, cold - air.

I want to take a close-up look

at one of the line's most striking structures.

This is the Kalte Rinne viaduct.

And what impresses me is that the engineers,

who were having to do something that had never been done before,

still had enough passion left to make it beautiful.

Von Ghega's achievements are widely recognised today,

and by one man perhaps more than most.

-Hello. Are you Georg?

-Yes, I'm Georg.

-Georg, good to see you.

Michael.

Ah, thank you.

Georg Zwickl is such a devotee of the engineer that he moved here

from Vienna to build a museum in his honour.

It's perched at the top of the 46m tall Kalte Rinne viaduct.

Georg, this is fantastic.

Perfect little museum. What is this house, Georg?

-In this house always worked two men who looked at the train.

-Yeah.

-So this was built by the railway for some of their workers?

-Yes.

-Do you live close by?

-I live here, yes.

-Ha! You live in a museum?

-Yes.

A model of the viaduct.

-That is fantastic.

-It's exact.

-It's exact?

-Yes.

-I can believe it.

Superb. The Kalte Rinne viaduct.

In all its majesty.

And here's the house.

That's where we are.

Built to the exact scale, this really is a work of precision.

You have a wonderful view from your house, don't you?

This is perfect. A train spotter's paradise.

Greatest model train in Europe.

The greatest model train in Europe, I believe it.

The Semmering Pass transformed this landscape forever.

Soon, the viaducts were joined by villas and hotels,

built to accommodate the many tourists

coming to enjoy one of the first alpine resorts.

Bradshaw's tells me that Semmering is one of the favourite resorts

both in summer and winter.

Now I've never done any alpine sports.

But when it comes to my duty,

there'll be no slipping or sliding by me.

At the time of my guidebook, many of the capital's modernist writers

and artists were coming here to find inspiration for their work

and get their alpine kicks.

Off to the snowy peaks before I make my daredevil descent.

It took men of courage to build the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And today, I feel inspired by their example.

Yay!

Although skiing didn't become common until the 1930s,

skating, bobsleighing and tobogganing were all popular

for the most thrill-seeking of Edwardian tourists.

As thrilling as it was to get down the mountain like that,

I think I'll stick to train travel.

Gruss Gott.

I'm heading 66 miles south

towards another popular Edwardian destination.

My journey from Vienna to the Adriatic continues

and my next stop will be Graz, which Bradshaw's tells me is,

"..the picturesquely situation capital of Styria,

"1,135 feet above the sea on the River Mur

"and one of the healthiest of Austrian towns."

I really am enjoying this beautiful, snowy alpine scenery.

And it will be a pleasure to spend the night there.

Arriving in the evening,

I'll save my exploration of Austria's second city for the morning.

'Next time, when my journey continues

'through the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

'I'll delve into the history of caving...'

-You will hang like this...

-I wondered how I would hang!

'I'll explore Slovenia's patriotic past...'

-It's extraordinary, isn't it? The power of that is amazing.

-Yes.

'And I'll absorb the national spirit...'

-You want to try mine?

-Yeah, I'd love to.

Mmm! LAUGHTER

Na zdravje, na zdravje, na zdravje!