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1 FLOOR
Room I: The history of railways
The railway age in Austria was heralded in 1832 with the completion of
the “horse-drawn railway” from Linz-Urfahr to Budweis. The project was
realised under Emperor Franz II. The railway served for transporting
goods, and the trains were pulled along tracked routes by horses.
The opening of the first partial stretch of the “Kaiser-Ferdinands-
Nordbahn” railway in 1837 was ground-breaking for the development of
the railway, as the first steam railway in Austria started operations.
After it was completed, the railway ran from Vienna to the northern
province of the empire.
Further pioneering work took place in the years 1848 to 1854 with the
construction of the first mountain railway in the world, the
“Semmeringbahn”.
These projects set the course for the development of a regional and
national railway network with connections extending beyond Austria. As
early as 1857 there was uninterrupted track from the North Sea to the
Adriatic. With the opening of the “Kronprinz-Rudolf-Bahn”, which ran
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