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I can actually see 4 daily EC services in each direction - one of them runs only between Bratislava and Wien Westbahnhof. Good spot on the Marchegg (Gr), I can't see that on the Scotty App.
They do take nearly an hour from arriving at Hbf to arriving at Westbahnhof!
Has running between Wien Hbf and Wien Westbahnhof always been a thing? Or is that only from the Dec 2025 timetable? The Vienna - Poland services seem to do the same thing.
Seems an awful waste of resources - nearly 2 hours of resources (rolling stock, crew, drivers) carrying fresh air.
This is partly why I've always been sceptical of European efforts to turn terminus stations stations into through ones. You end up with really inefficient overlapping cross-city movements just to terminate on the other side of town. Same goes for Berlin Hbf where services from the Hannover direction carry fresh air between Hbf and Rummelsburg yard and they are scratching their head over the Stadtbahn becoming over capacity.
Has running between Wien Hbf and Wien Westbahnhof always been a thing? Or is that only from the Dec 2025 timetable? The Vienna - Poland services seem to do the same thing.
Seems an awful waste of resources - nearly 2 hours of resources (rolling stock, crew, drivers) carrying fresh air.
This is partly why I've always been sceptical of European efforts to turn terminus stations stations into through ones. You end up with really inefficient overlapping cross-city movements just to terminate on the other side of town. Same goes for Berlin Hbf where services from the Hannover direction carry fresh air between Hbf and Rummelsburg yard and they are scratching their head over the Stadtbahn becoming over capacity.
I might have been exaggerating a bit, but they do take 42 minutes from Hbf to Westbahnhof (and the same in the opposite direction) with 2 hours layover in Westbahnhof. 12-14 minutes dwell at Hbf and 22 minutes between Meidling and Westbahnhof.
AFAIK the running to Westbahnhof is indeed new, there was an application to the regulator for it last year I think.
This is partly why I've always been sceptical of European efforts to turn terminus stations stations into through ones. You end up with really inefficient overlapping cross-city movements just to terminate on the other side of town. Same goes for Berlin Hbf where services from the Hannover direction carry fresh air between Hbf and Rummelsburg yard and they are scratching their head over the Stadtbahn becoming over capacity.
There are many through services via Berlin Hbf, especially regional trains, but also ICEs. I'm not sure how you would accommodate those services efficiently otherwise.
I might have been exaggerating a bit, but they do take 42 minutes from Hbf to Westbahnhof (and the same in the opposite direction) with 2 hours layover in Westbahnhof. 12-14 minutes dwell at Hbf and 22 minutes between Meidling and Westbahnhof.
AFAIK the running to Westbahnhof is indeed new, there was an application to the regulator for it last year I think.
Making a simple assumption that the economic useful parts of the working are Poland/Slovakia to Wien Hbf arr, and Wien Hbf dep back to Poland/Slovakia, every roundtrip has nearly 4 hours of dead time (and mileage) in Vienna.
People criticise HS2's model of loads of terminus platforms at Euston and point-to-point services, but to me the 25-minute turnarounds (55 for Scotlands) feel far more efficient in the long run.
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There are many through services via Berlin Hbf, especially regional trains, but also ICEs. I'm not sure how you would accommodate those services efficiently otherwise.
Keep the old Hamburger and Potsdammerplatz terminus stations for inter-city services, and use the Stadtbahn for east-west regionals only. Build a much smaller scalle Hbf Tief (Thameslink sized) for north-south regionals (or maybe a 4-platform station to accommodate a limited set of defined through ICE flows like Hamburg - Dresden). They wouldn't have run out of money for finishing S21. All academic now of course.
Making a simple assumption that the economic useful parts of the working are Poland/Slovakia to Wien Hbf arr, and Wien Hbf dep back to Poland/Slovakia, every roundtrip has nearly 4 hours of dead time (and mileage) in Vienna.
People criticise HS2's model of loads of terminus platforms at Euston and point-to-point services, but to me the 25-minute turnarounds (55 for Scotlands) feel far more efficient in the long run.
The layovers in the Polish services were already there, and the stock presumably sat in the yard at Meidling, so it's potentially good use of marginal time.
The Slovak services are an extension of the Kosice-Bratislava service and with a 4-hourly interval to Wien you you inevitably have a long layover. I imagine that if the service succeeds it will go 2-hourly with no extra stock required.
The layovers in the Polish services were already there, and the stock presumably sat in the yard at Meidling, so it's potentially good use of marginal time.
The Slovak services are an extension of the Kosice-Bratislava service and with a 4-hourly interval to Wien you you inevitably have a long layover. I imagine that if the service succeeds it will go 2-hourly with no extra stock required.
Did the Polish services always have 4 hours to fester at Vienna? Seems excessive even for this kind of uber long-distance services. Unless those sorts of operations are only ever expected to be one round trip a day then the layover almost doesn't matter ...
Going forward (a long way into the future admittedly) when currently planned cross-border high-speed lines are all complete, you'd want to move from today's 'daily train pair' concept to the 'full day diagrams' concept more common in the UK where each trainset is expected to do multiple round trips within a day, that is when turnaround times and asset utilisation will matter.
The layovers in the Polish services were already there, and the stock presumably sat in the yard at Meidling, so it's potentially good use of marginal time.
The Slovak services are an extension of the Kosice-Bratislava service and with a 4-hourly interval to Wien you you inevitably have a long layover. I imagine that if the service succeeds it will go 2-hourly with no extra stock required.
The stock mostly lays over in Wien West already, until now its ECS moves which will be opened to the public. The Slow Running times are mostly to enable flexibility on what are very congested routes and junctions. Mostly, they will arrive early.
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This is partly why I've always been sceptical of European efforts to turn terminus stations stations into through ones. You end up with really inefficient overlapping cross-city movements just to terminate on the other side of town.
The raison d‘etre of Wien Hbf was to have a single Long-distance railway station in Vienna, enabling easy transfers. In this, it has been enormously successful.
I fail to see how it could have been built as a Terminus, which would have needed vastly more platforms - and there is no space available for this. If anything, Wien Hbf has been too successful and already gets short on capacity, as does the Depot next to it, where the site is similarly constrained.
There is, however, enormous capacity in Wien West and around it. While running ECS moves there costs money, Building new depot capacity around Wien Hbf would be vastly more expensive, if possible at all.
The raison d‘etre of Wien Hbf was to have a single Long-distance railway station in Vienna, enabling easy transfers. In this, it has been enormously successful.
I fail to see how it could have been built as a Terminus, which would have needed vastly more platforms - and there is no space available for this. If anything, Wien Hbf has been too successful and already gets short on capacity, as does the Depot next to it, where the site is similarly constrained.
There is, however, enormous capacity in Wien West and around it. While running ECS moves there costs money, Building new depot capacity around Wien Hbf would be vastly more expensive, if possible at all.
Keep the old Hamburger and Potsdammerplatz terminus stations for inter-city services, and use the Stadtbahn for east-west regionals only. Build a much smaller scalle Hbf Tief (Thameslink sized) for north-south regionals (or maybe a 4-platform station to accommodate a limited set of defined through ICE flows like Hamburg - Dresden). They wouldn't have run out of money for finishing S21. All academic now of course.
What nonsense! Berlin Hbf is a fantastic station, befitting the capital of a unified Germany, and it is convenient for passengers - you know the ones who pay the fares - to have all long-distance service departing from the same place and for interchange purposes. All the original terminal stations in West Berlin had been heavily damaged in WW2 or demolished shortly after for there was simply no need for them in a divided city - Zoo sufficed. Hamburger station closed in 1884 - I asume you mean Lehrter.
Even in Manchester it is a pain now that the main Trans-Pennine services have reverted to Victoria if you are coming from the south of the city.
What nonsense! Berlin Hbf is a fantastic station, befitting the capital of a unified Germany, and it is convenient for passengers - you know the ones who pay the fares - to have all long-distance service departing from the same place and for interchange purposes. All the original terminal stations in West Berlin had been heavily damaged in WW2 or demolished shortly after for there was simply no need for them in a divided city - Zoo sufficed. Hamburger station closed in 1884 - I asume you mean Lehrter.
Even in Manchester it is a pain now that the main Trans-Pennine services have reverted to Victoria if you are coming from the south of the city.
Berlin is imbalanced - there's much more to its west and south than to its east and north. It means the lion's share of long-distance services from the west and south end up having to terminate in Berlin. When the infrastructure is designed to deal with balanced through traffic, operating a service pattern that has a mix of through and terminating traffic and imbalanced service level, well, doesn't work.
As things are set up the Berlin network will struggle to support a future full-HSR no domestic aviation scenario. This should be considered a plausible aspiration as that's simply replicating what Italy has already largely achieved. In such a scenario Berlin towards Hannover would support 10tph (2x Hannover then alternate Bremen / Oldenburg, 2x Dusseldorf, 2x Cologne, 2x Braunchweig - Goettingen, 1x Amsterdam, 1x semi-fast towards Osnabrueck); Berlin - Poland would be 3tph (2tph Warsaw, then 1tph split between Wroclaw and Gdansk directions), 4tph REs via Wansee. This is already assuming the Stammbahn takes over the Potsdam regionals.
That's 18tph operating over the Stadtbahn between Zoo and Ostbahnhof. That'd be ok if all 18tph were homogenous, but you've actually got a mixture of ICEs that need longer dwells at Hbf and regionals that need to call at Friedrichstrasse.
From the south, for ICEs the market would support 10tph (2x Dresden, 2x Munich, 2x Frankfurt, 2x Leipzig, 1x Basel, 1x Stuttgart), and only realistically only 6 would continue north (2x Hamburg fast, 2x Hamburg semi-fast, then 2tph rotating between Szczecin, Stralsund and Rostock which are really only RE markets). It's worse with Rs/REs. From the south you have Flughafen Express, Blankenfelde locals, Ludwigsfelde locals and Stammbahn totalling something like 16 tph, but the north side market is no more than 8tph. That's an awful lot of services to turn around at Gesundbrunnen from the south, but platforms and crossovers aren't really in the right places.
An alternative set of infrastructure with a Farringdon sized Hbf tief and retained & expanded Lehrte and Potsdammerplatz stations would be able to support this sort of service pattern quite easily and would have been rather cheaper to build.
It's obvious Hbf is a political project (laudable as it might have been given the circumstances of the time), and it's also obvious there are basic specification errors and the government bit off more than it could chew. The layout of at Spandau is asymmetric - which one of Hamburg lines and Hannover lines goes to which of Stadtbahn and Wedding isn't the same in both directions which means you can't have two independent operating systems. You have an expensive 4 tunnelled tracks through a palatial Potsdamerplatz station yet that station can only have 4tph regional calls. They ran out of money and Dresdnerbahn and Berlin 21 are taking forever to build.
The stock mostly lays over in Wien West already, until now its ECS moves which will be opened to the public. The Slow Running times are mostly to enable flexibility on what are very congested routes and junctions. Mostly, they will arrive early.
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The raison d‘etre of Wien Hbf was to have a single Long-distance railway station in Vienna, enabling easy transfers. In this, it has been enormously successful.
I fail to see how it could have been built as a Terminus, which would have needed vastly more platforms - and there is no space available for this. If anything, Wien Hbf has been too successful and already gets short on capacity, as does the Depot next to it, where the site is similarly constrained.
There is, however, enormous capacity in Wien West and around it. While running ECS moves there costs money, Building new depot capacity around Wien Hbf would be vastly more expensive, if possible at all.
On paper the infrastructure looks neat, everything from Bruck/Mur (from Graz or Leoben) goes to Stadlau (Bratislava or Breclav), everything from Linz goes to the airport or Budapest. Yet such ideas of through running almost always have to face reality - punctuality of uber-long-distance services, realistic reach of operators, rolling stock compatibility, etc.
So while the current Hbf gives the appearance of offering through travel, in practice the vast majority of passengers through Vienna still have to change trains anyway.
I think expanding the old Sudbahnhof and Ostbahnhof would have worked just as well for handling increased frequency of services. Those tunnels bringing the Westbahn to what would be an expanded Sudbahnhof would have been worthwhile, but I suspect you'd have got away with a much simpler set of junctions around Meidling.
The way to make terminus stations work is to have sub-1-hour turnarounds. If the majority of services' operating environment are high-speed self-contained then you only need 25 minutes (so 2 turnarounds per platform per hour). You'd only need a couple more platforms at each of the old Sudbahnhof and Ostbahnhof to support half-hourly services in all major directions.
What is built is built, and Wien Hbf and Berlin Hbf will most probably work alright at least for the medium term.
========================
Knowing how Wien Hbf and Berlin Hbf actually operate in practice, it's even more abundantly clear that having separate termini for HS2 and HS1 is the right thing to do. To people who think we should have had Euston cross or variants, what we'd end up having would be a yard at Ebbsfleet for terminating HS2 services and a yard at Old Oak Common for terminating HS1 services. Either service frequency on both would be constrained by each other, or you'd need a four-tracked tunnel system between Old Oak and Ebbsfleet in order to support 12tph HS1 services and 18tph HS2 services, with half the tunnel km carrying trains carting fresh air.
Berlin is imbalanced - there's much more to its west and south than to its east and north. It means the lion's share of long-distance services from the west and south end up having to terminate in Berlin. When the infrastructure is designed to deal with balanced through traffic, operating a service pattern that has a mix of through and terminating traffic and imbalanced service level, well, doesn't work.
As things are set up the Berlin network will struggle to support a future full-HSR no domestic aviation scenario. This should be considered a plausible aspiration as that's simply replicating what Italy has already largely achieved. In such a scenario Berlin towards Hannover would support 10tph (2x Hannover then alternate Bremen / Oldenburg, 2x Dusseldorf, 2x Cologne, 2x Braunchweig - Goettingen, 1x Amsterdam, 1x semi-fast towards Osnabrueck); Berlin - Poland would be 3tph (2tph Warsaw, then 1tph split between Wroclaw and Gdansk directions), 4tph REs via Wansee. This is already assuming the Stammbahn takes over the Potsdam regionals.
That's 18tph operating over the Stadtbahn between Zoo and Ostbahnhof. That'd be ok if all 18tph were homogenous, but you've actually got a mixture of ICEs that need longer dwells at Hbf and regionals that need to call at Friedrichstrasse.
From the south, for ICEs the market would support 10tph (2x Dresden, 2x Munich, 2x Frankfurt, 2x Leipzig, 1x Basel, 1x Stuttgart), and only realistically only 6 would continue north (2x Hamburg fast, 2x Hamburg semi-fast, then 2tph rotating between Szczecin, Stralsund and Rostock which are really only RE markets). It's worse with Rs/REs. From the south you have Flughafen Express, Blankenfelde locals, Ludwigsfelde locals and Stammbahn totalling something like 16 tph, but the north side market is no more than 8tph. That's an awful lot of services to turn around at Gesundbrunnen from the south, but platforms and crossovers aren't really in the right places.
An alternative set of infrastructure with a Farringdon sized Hbf tief and retained & expanded Lehrte and Potsdammerplatz stations would be able to support this sort of service pattern quite easily and would have been rather cheaper to build.
It's obvious Hbf is a political project (laudable as it might have been given the circumstances of the time), and it's also obvious there are basic specification errors and the government bit off more than it could chew. The layout of at Spandau is asymmetric - which one of Hamburg lines and Hannover lines goes to which of Stadtbahn and Wedding isn't the same in both directions which means you can't have two independent operating systems. You have an expensive 4 tunnelled tracks through a palatial Potsdamerplatz station yet that station can only have 4tph regional calls. They ran out of money and Dresdnerbahn and Berlin 21 are taking forever to build.
On paper the infrastructure looks neat, everything from Bruck/Mur (from Graz or Leoben) goes to Stadlau (Bratislava or Breclav), everything from Linz goes to the airport or Budapest. Yet such ideas of through running almost always have to face reality - punctuality of uber-long-distance services, realistic reach of operators, rolling stock compatibility, etc.
So while the current Hbf gives the appearance of offering through travel, in practice the vast majority of passengers through Vienna still have to change trains anyway.
I think expanding the old Sudbahnhof and Ostbahnhof would have worked just as well for handling increased frequency of services. Those tunnels bringing the Westbahn to what would be an expanded Sudbahnhof would have been worthwhile, but I suspect you'd have got away with a much simpler set of junctions around Meidling.
The way to make terminus stations work is to have sub-1-hour turnarounds. If the majority of services' operating environment are high-speed self-contained then you only need 25 minutes (so 2 turnarounds per platform per hour). You'd only need a couple more platforms at each of the old Sudbahnhof and Ostbahnhof to support half-hourly services in all major directions.
What is built is built, and Wien Hbf and Berlin Hbf will most probably work alright at least for the medium term.
========================
Knowing how Wien Hbf and Berlin Hbf actually operate in practice, it's even more abundantly clear that having separate termini for HS2 and HS1 is the right thing to do. To people who think we should have had Euston cross or variants, what we'd end up having would be a yard at Ebbsfleet for terminating HS2 services and a yard at Old Oak Common for terminating HS1 services. Either service frequency on both would be constrained by each other, or you'd need a four-tracked tunnel system between Old Oak and Ebbsfleet in order to support 12tph HS1 services and 18tph HS2 services, with half the tunnel km carrying trains carting fresh air.
What can I say? Thankfully, you are not the one who did the planning in Vienna, as we would have ended with a massively worse network than we have now, still designed for the era where Vienna was the Capital of a large monarchy and the final destination for almost every Long-distance traveler.
BTW, the through running East-West and North-South long-distance trains perfectly serve the vast majority of through demand, and will so even more in Future when Bratislava gets integrated and the new line from the Airport to the east is built, enabling all through trains to serve Vienna Airport.
If anything went wrong in Vienna, it is that the originally (vaguely) planned second (underground) level was not pursued.
Sorry to say, what you are doing is the equivalent to armchair football coaching. You are perfectly entitled to your opinion of course, but I am entitled to not take it seriously.
What can I say? Thankfully, you are not the one who did the planning in Vienna, as we would have ended with a massively worse network than we have now, still designed for the era where Vienna was the Capital of a large monarchy and the final destination for almost every Long-distance traveler.
BTW, the through running East-West and North-South long-distance trains perfectly serve the vast majority of through demand, and will so even more in Future when Bratislava gets integrated and the new line from the Airport to the east is built, enabling all through trains to serve Vienna Airport.
If anything went wrong in Vienna, it is that the originally (vaguely) planned second (underground) level was not pursued.
Sorry to say, what you are doing is the equivalent to armchair football coaching. You are perfectly entitled to your opinion of course, but I am entitled to not take it seriously.
Yes, the only thing wrong with Vienna Hbf is the rather cranky interchange with the underground along a long corridor - I assume this is because of the original location of the Südbahnhof - and the trams could have been rerouted to serve the frontage rather than being in a dank underpass.
Yes, the only thing wrong with Vienna Hbf is the rather cranky interchange with the underground along a long corridor - I assume this is because of the original location of the Südbahnhof - and the trams could have been rerouted to serve the frontage rather than being in a dank underpass.
Yes. And imagine if the old Südbahnhof and Ostbahnhof had been kept - you would have no underground connection at all!
Wien Hbf is not perfect; not by any means. But not building it or something similar would have been an enormous mistake - the benefits to the city and the whole East of Austria (and arguably the West of Hungary and Slovakia) are huge.
Except this isn't what's happening on the ground. Half of Budapest trains still originate/terminate at Vienna, and almost all Polish trains originate/terminate at Vienna.
I'm trying to work out the routing of the Westbahnhof - Hauptbahnhof moves.
As far as I can make out, Wien Hbf is *supposed* to be used as follows:
Platforms 11 and 12 - island for Pottendorfer - Stadlau direction (is it (still) the plan that Semmering long-distance trains will eventually be routed via the Pottendorfer line?)
Platforms 9 and 10 - island for Westbahn - airport direction
Platforms 7 and 8 - island for airport - Westbahn direction
Platforms 5 and 6 - island for Stadlau - Pottendorfer direction
Platforms 3 and 4 - Huetteldorf - Stadlau S bahn trains (one platform face per direction).
You can probably conceivably terminate Westbahn or Budapest direction services in platforms 8 and 9 as they are in the centre of the formation. Terminating anything from the Stadlau direction in particular (in platforms 4 or 9) would mean crossing the airport//Budapest lines. The network isn't actually set up for 'go through and terminate on the other side' movements.
If Openrailwaymap is accurate and I'm tracing paths correctly - for the Westbahnhof to Hbf move, you are on the S-bahn tracks then you have to cross a single ladder, pass Meidling on platform 5 (bang road) then cross onto the eastbound Westbahn-airport line east of Maidling, then switch to Hbf platform 11/12 to then go down the Arsenaltunnel to be on the correct side of the formation for Stadlau. From what I can gather these trains don't use platform 4 (this would be a conflict free route) at Wien Hbf as platform 4 would not be able to accommodate an intercity dwell in between the S bahns. This can't be what the infrastructure was designed to do and can't be sustainable in the long run when service frequencies ramp up. It was fine when the Polish services were a handful a day. They are now two-hourly, and what happens when they become hourly?
Wien Hbf relies on everything running through to work but I think that was a naive design assumption.
Except this isn't what's happening on the ground. Half of Budapest trains still originate/terminate at Vienna, and almost all Polish trains originate/terminate at Vienna.
I'm trying to work out the routing of the Westbahnhof - Hauptbahnhof moves.
As far as I can make out, Wien Hbf is *supposed* to be used as follows:
Platforms 11 and 12 - island for Pottendorfer - Stadlau direction (is it (still) the plan that Semmering long-distance trains will eventually be routed via the Pottendorfer line?)
Platforms 9 and 10 - island for Westbahn - airport direction
Platforms 7 and 8 - island for airport - Westbahn direction
Platforms 5 and 6 - island for Stadlau - Pottendorfer direction
Platforms 3 and 4 - Huetteldorf - Stadlau S bahn trains (one platform face per direction).
You can probably conceivably terminate Westbahn or Budapest direction services in platforms 8 and 9 as they are in the centre of the formation. Terminating anything from the Stadlau direction in particular (in platforms 4 or 9) would mean crossing the airport//Budapest lines. The network isn't actually set up for 'go through and terminate on the other side' movements.
If Openrailwaymap is accurate and I'm tracing paths correctly - for the Westbahnhof to Hbf move, you are on the S-bahn tracks then you have to cross a single ladder, pass Meidling on platform 5 (bang road) then cross onto the eastbound Westbahn-airport line east of Maidling, then switch to Hbf platform 11/12 to then go down the Arsenaltunnel to be on the correct side of the formation for Stadlau. From what I can gather these trains don't use platform 4 (this would be a conflict free route) at Wien Hbf as platform 4 would not be able to accommodate an intercity dwell in between the S bahns. This can't be what the infrastructure was designed to do and can't be sustainable in the long run when service frequencies ramp up. It was fine when the Polish services were a handful a day. They are now two-hourly, and what happens when they become hourly?
Wien Hbf relies on everything running through to work but I think that was a naive design assumption.
Nothing official - I used Vagonweb: this has standard formations for all of them (bar the Graz which doesn't use PKP stock) but a couple are formed wrong way round - hence being able to link them.
It 'works' when many directions are operating well below the long-term potential frequency.
It 'works' for you as a user when considering just your needs. When considering the externalities of level crossing downtime and competing for finite capacity with the economically useful S80 (which at every 30 minutes is poor for a capital S bahn line), then the system as a whole doesn't quite work.
One can only hope that by the time long time full frequencies are needed (using the 2040 network as a benchmark) more services will be unit operated and the Meidling sidings might be sufficient for all the turnarounds.
In alle honesty, do not embarass yourself further by arguing things you don‘t know about. The S80 30-Minute-frequency is because of limitations elsewhere, not at Hbf and its approaches. The layout there works perfectly well for a denser S-Bahn service, and projects are in place elsewhere to increase frequency.
In alle honesty, do not embarass yourself further by arguing things you don‘t know about. The S80 30-Minute-frequency is because of limitations elsewhere, not at Hbf and its approaches. The layout there works perfectly well for a denser S-Bahn service, and projects are in place elsewhere to increase frequency.
Level crossing downtime is clearly a recognised problem. You described the Connecting Line as congested, yet declare that the system works. That's self contradictory. A situation whereby the number of Hbf-Wbf workings ramp up before the Connecting Line project can be funded and delivered isn't a trivial one that should be just hand-waved away, especially when you consider the economic value of the thing that causes the level crossing downtime increase. It's something that ought to have been better foreseen and avoided in the first place.
Level crossing downtime is clearly a recognised problem. You described the Connecting Line as congested, yet declare that the system works. That's self contradictory. A situation whereby the number of Hbf-Wbf workings ramp up before the Connecting Line project can be funded and delivered isn't a trivial one that should be just hand-waved away, especially when you consider the economic value of the thing that causes the level crossing downtime increase. It's something that ought to have been better foreseen and avoided in the first place.
OMG, where do I even start. First of all, the connecting line you mention is one of the least important in the whole Vienna region (and is absolutely ancillary to the whole Hbf-Meidling complex), and while a more frequent S80 will be nice, it is a long way away from being the most important or consequential transport project in the Vienna region.
Second, you might mistake Austria for I do not know what. We are a wealthy country, but can not afford to build all major projects at the same time (you probably are aware that three major routes in alpine regions have been or are still being built), nor would we have the Building capacity for it. There Are, in fact, many projects that relate to Wien Hbf still in the works or projected.
But I give up. By all means stick to your opinions, just don‘t expect to be taken seriously of you get all the Basics and relevant facts wrong.
OMG, where do I even start. First of all, the connecting line you mention is one of the least important in the whole Vienna region (and is absolutely ancillary to the whole Hbf-Meidling complex), and while a more frequent S80 will be nice, it is a long way away from being the most important or consequential transport project in the Vienna region.
Second, you might mistake Austria for I do not know what. We are wealthy country, but can not afford to build all major projects at the same time (you probably are aware that three major routes in alpine regions have been or are still being built), nor would we have the Building capacity for it.
But I give up. By all means stick to your opinions, just don‘t expect to be taken seriously of you get all the Basics and relevant facts wrong.
The Connecting Line is being used as a dumping ground for Hbf terminating trains from the east. Among other things level crossing downtime is clearly an issue - surely you must see that? Ignore the S80 (I agree making it more frequent is nice-to-have rather than essential), it's these Hbf-Wbf moves that's putting pressure on the Connecting Line and those moves represents inefficient use of resources? While you might consider this situation tolerable (and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that), surely you recognise that's far from ideal, and more importantly, far from inevitable?
Your mistake is assuming I advocate simply building your way out of problems. That is not what I'm advocating. My point is that, had the terminating vs through movement question been better considered, the reliance on using the Connecting Line could have been avoided.
The point is this - had the S80 remained the sole driver for Connecting Line upgrade then yes it would be unimportant and could wait until the cows come home. The increase in the number of Hbf-Wbf movements in the 2026 timetable (+1 Polish service, +4 Slovakian services) risks becoming a driver of investment - a hitherto inconsequential line has gained importance for the wrong reasons (uneconomical use of the line).
The Connecting Line is being used as a dumping ground for Hbf terminating trains from the east. Among other things level crossing downtime is clearly an issue - surely you must see that? Ignore the S80 (I agree making it more frequent is nice-to-have rather than essential), it's these Hbf-Wbf moves that's putting pressure on the Connecting Line and those moves represents inefficient use of resources? While you might consider this situation tolerable (and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that), surely you recognise that's far from ideal, and more importantly, far from inevitable?
Your mistake is assuming I advocate simply building your way out of problems. That is not what I'm advocating. My point is that, had the terminating vs through movement question been better considered, the reliance on using the Connecting Line could have been avoided.
The point is this - had the S80 remained the sole driver for Connecting Line upgrade then yes it would be unimportant and could wait until the cows come home. The increase in the number of Hbf-Wbf movements in the 2026 timetable (+1 Polish service, +4 Slovakian services) risks becoming a driver of investment - a hitherto inconsequential line has gained importance for the wrong reasons (uneconomical use of the line).
It is *not* uneconomical to use vast spare stabling space when huge investment would be necessary for any alternative. As has been stated by another poster before, the Meidling - Westbahnhof line is accessible both from the S-Bahn and the LD Tracks in Meidling and in each direction, there is one Alternative that is conflict-free or almost so.
I said before that Wien Hbf is a victim of its own success. The traffic has grown beyond recognition, but simply noone could foresee this at the planning Phase, when Rail was neither very attractive nor very well used here. As it is, there will be further investment necessary and that can be tailored where and when it is the most cost-effective. And there *will* be more through running in the future, even if it will never be *everything*.
As it is, the point about alternatives is moot IMO. There is no way the old Arrangement with two Terminus stations could have supported anything like the current traffic level. Termini can work well when identical train sets zoom in and out with minimal layover, but this is simply not the situation we are or ever will be in. You don‘t simply turn around a Train in 10 Minuten that has come all the way from Gdansk or Warsaw, and we will never be in a situation where all LD Rolling stock will be identical for the simple fact that so many of our trains are international ones and there will never be a uniform fleet.
The one- serious - regret one could have is that the second, underground level at Wien Hbf has not been pursued.
BTW, it is not as if the current S80 project is uncontroversial. Many people, myself included, would much prefer to join the S80 and S45 lines, creating many more new or much improved journey opportunities than the stand-alone version.
It is *not* uneconomical to use vast spare stabling space when huge investment would be necessary for any alternative. As has been stated by another poster before, the Meidling - Westbahnhof line is accessible both from the S-Bahn and the LD Tracks in Meidling and in each direction, there is one Alternative that is conflict-free or almost so.
I said before that Wien Hbf is a victim of its own success. The traffic has grown beyond recognition, but simply noone could foresee this at the planning Phase, when Rail was neither very attractive nor very well used here. As it is, there will be further investment necessary and that can be tailored where and when it is the most cost-effective. And there *will* be more through running in the future, even if it will never be *everything*.
As it is, the point about alternatives is moot IMO. There is no way the old Arrangement with two Terminus stations could have supported anything like the current traffic level. Termini can work well when identical train sets zoom in and out with minimal layover, but this is simply not the situation we are or ever will be in. You don‘t simply turn around a Train in 10 Minuten that has come all the way from Gdansk or Warsaw, and we will never be in a situation where all LD Rolling stock will be identical for the simple fact that so many of our trains are international ones and there will never be a uniform fleet.
The one- serious - regret one could have is that the second, underground level at Wien Hbf has not been pursued.
BTW, it is not as if the current S80 project is uncontroversial. Many people, myself included, would much prefer to join the S80 and S45 lines, creating many more new or much improved journey opportunities than the stand-alone version.
I have acknowledged this topic is entirely academic, I have also said that in the context of Vienna itself the layout will probably work alright. This is an international section of a UK forum, so forgive me if my interaction is through the lens of 'what does this mean for the UK'. If this doesn't interest you you are welcome to read on.
Rolling stock utilisation is uneconomical. The infrastructure doesn't come free either - all at Hbf-Wbf mileage incurs variable wear and tear which will need to be paid for. Level crossing downtime carries a quantifiable economic cost.
I see you've qualified the 'conflict-free' with 'almost so'. IMO 'almost' isn't good enough for the most important and busiest node in Austria, and arguably the centre of the Central European rail network. I'll wait until platforming is published for the 2026 timetable, as each routing through Meidling carries its particular set of problems, and I don't want to list every possible eventuality.
Vienna's network is built for flexibility. The problem with building for flexibility is that the movements you end up having to accommodate almost always turn out to the ones you didn't design the infrastructure for. In this instance luck came to the rescue (that the Connecting Line and Westbahnhof happen to be available. For a rail-competent country it shouldn't have come to luck. Your point about the S80 project being controversial is an important one - we've created a dependency between ramping up long-distance services to the east and a controversial / low priority project. That dependency should never have existed in the first place. I recognise that there are probably credible mitigation options on the horizon that means what's currently an annoyance won't turn into a problem - i.e. by the time Polish and Slovakian ECs
I'm advocating for discipline. Build your infrastructure to send a very clear message how that infrastructure is intended to be used - as the Dutch have done at Utrecht. I've never mentioned turning a train around in 10 minutes - so I'd appreciate if you didn't try to misrepresent my point. A 10-platform face Ostbahnhof would be more than capable of turning around the long-distance services from Stadlau / Budapest.
'Bringing all long-distance services into one station' need not mean making everything work through. All that's needed would have been building the Westbahn connection. Westbahn could have been designated the specific direction to run through to the airport and Budapest. Instead of demolishing the entire old station, one could have kept (and marginally expanded) the old terminus stations and just built one or two through islands on the current Hbf station footprint for 4tph Westbahn - Airport - Hungary movements and S80, S60 and regional trains. You would not need additional yard space for terminating long-distance trains. I believe all that could be done for a lower cost than Hbf and the whole railway estate would be more land efficient.
As for 'there *will* be more through running in the future' - that's an article of faith, which has proven unreliable and I have no reason to believe it'll be reliable for the future. Through running relies far more on uniform fleet than terminus workings. Terminus workings only require fixed formation. With terminus workings you can have different train lengths and different top speeds on different sides - for through workings you need everything compatible. You've made two statements
1) so many of our trains are international ones and there will never be a uniform fleet
2) there *will* be more through running in the future
One statement will dominate the other and in my view it's clear that 1) will dominate for the foreseeable future. 200km/h PKP units on order will be no good for the 250km/h Koralmbahn (and Semmering from 2030) timings. The way things are evolving, you'll have more Westbahn coming from Graz more Regiojet coming from the north both with very different rolling stock strategies/requirements. I think the conditions for more terminating moves being required at Hbf in the future are already baked in.
I disagree that nobody could have foreseen the current operating pattern when Hbf was being planned - the major Austrian schemes were well underway, the Czech high-speed plans were being drawn up; the international nature of the Vienna node was probably even more clear back then and liberalisation wasn't a new thing either. The basic idea of a 2tph frequency per major direction per speed profile (basically what's in the 2040 target network) wouldn't have been controversial in the early 2000s (as you wouldn't have made the Westbahn and Koralmbahn investments for anything less).
There is probably enough spare capacity in the system for those 'run through and terminate on the other side' movements. For somewhere as strategic as Vienna, such spare capacity ought to be kept 'clean' as performance buffer, not clogged with ECS movements just because you can 'get away with it'.
If you don't want to engage with any of the above (and I won't be offended), my basic point is this -
Do I think the Vienna node is a success? On the whole, yes. Do I see it as a blueprint for other node improvement projects in Britain? Almost certainly not.
Since it came up a lot in this discussion: the trains from Poland via Wien Hbf to Wien West and Vice versa are booked to use platforms 7 and 8 at Wien Meidling, meaning they don‘t touch the S-Bahn tracks.
Going towards Wien West, they can use the flyover from Hbf and after calling in Meidling on platform 7, they have to cross the tracks towards Meidling (minimal conflict there) to then access the „Oswaldschleife“ towards Speising, Penzing and Westbhf. In the opposite direction, there is no conflict at all.
Same goes for Berlin Hbf where services from the Hannover direction carry fresh air between Hbf and Rummelsburg yard and they are scratching their head over the Stadtbahn becoming over capacity.
Unrelated to Wien but relevant to ÖBB trains waiting for long amounts of time, any reason why RJXs from Bregenz to Vienna have nearly an hour of waiting time at Innsbruck?
Unrelated to Wien but relevant to ÖBB trains waiting for long amounts of time, any reason why RJXs from Bregenz to Vienna have nearly an hour of waiting time at Innsbruck?
You didn't mention a date, but there are currently engineering works east of Innsbruck, with some of the trains being diverted via the Inntaltunnel. In the normal timetable, they only have a 3-minute stop.
Unrelated to Wien but relevant to ÖBB trains waiting for long amounts of time, any reason why RJXs from Bregenz to Vienna have nearly an hour of waiting time at Innsbruck?
You didn't mention a date, but there are currently engineering works east of Innsbruck, with some of the trains being diverted via the Inntaltunnel. In the normal timetable, they only have a 3-minute stop.
Indeed. They wait in Innsbruck to take up a regular path an hour later, avoiding the need to completely remake the timetable west of Innsbruck for temporary works.
Innsbruck, Tyrol and Vorarlberg unfortunately will have to get used to longer journey times to the East of Austria from summer 2026 to summer 2027 anyway (because of DB route closures).
Since it came up a lot in this discussion: the trains from Poland via Wien Hbf to Wien West and Vice versa are booked to use platforms 7 and 8 at Wien Meidling, meaning they don‘t touch the S-Bahn tracks.
Going towards Wien West, they can use the flyover from Hbf and after calling in Meidling on platform 7, they have to cross the tracks towards Meidling (minimal conflict there) to then access the „Oswaldschleife“ towards Speising, Penzing and Westbhf. In the opposite direction, there is no conflict at all.
I had failed to notice the Oswaldschleife. It's a slow speed single line curve used 4 times an hour: looking at Meidling p7-8 times:
- 11:38 - from Budapest depart towards Wien Westbahnhof
- 11:51 - arrive from Wien Westbahnhof towards Poland
- 12:08 - from Poland depart towards Wien Westbahnhof
- 12:21 - arrive from Wien Westbahnhof towards Budapest
The next hour is currently free, as both sets of services are two hourly. However, I've seen Bratislava EC paths occupying the other hour to one of these sets of paths, but those Bratislava ECs seem to have been pulled from the 2026 timetable.
The curve towards Penzing is also single line. For a route with 2 single line sections, 4tph isn't a low utilisation. And if I were a resident of the west side of Vienna I'd be pretty miffed if 4 of the level crossing down times per hour were because of empty trains.
Vienna has been lucky it happens to have such a level of redundant infrastructure that can accommodate this kind of 'unplanned' elaborate terminating moves involving a 40-minute run in, 2 hour turnaround, and 40-minute run out. In an HS2 context, you definitely wouldn't be building such infrastructure as new.
I think a slightly better alternative to Berlin Hbf would have been to tunnel four extra tracks east-west tracks with stations at Zoo, Lehrter Bahnhof Tief (Hbf site) and Alexanderplatz. This would have given trains in the new tunnels stops at the old western and eastern town centres, which lots of the U bahn lines serve. Not sure how to serve the north-south s bahn- you could shift the Lehrter Bhf station to Friedrichstrasse, but there might not have been space. I think this scheme would have cost more and needed some trains to run into the tunnels via very indirect approaches.
The curve towards Penzing is also single line. For a route with 2 single line sections, 4tph isn't a low utilisation. And if I were a resident of the west side of Vienna I'd be pretty miffed if 4 of the level crossing down times per hour were because of empty trains.
Vienna has been lucky it happens to have such a level of redundant infrastructure that can accommodate this kind of 'unplanned' elaborate terminating moves involving a 40-minute run in, 2 hour turnaround, and 40-minute run out. In an HS2 context, you definitely wouldn't be building such infrastructure as new.
Four trains per hour is very few, even for a single-track line. Even on infrastructure that has not been specially upgraded, twelve or more trains per hour are easily possible. Marked in yellow here is the timetable for a single-track line, which is served by twelve trains per hour and still offers reserves for ECS and freight traffic. A little further on, there is another single-track section. All trains running there also come from longer single-track sections at the other end of the line.
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