Austria Ordinary Rolling Roads and Waterways

The ordinary rolling roads – excluding the country roads, the mule tracks and the paths – measured for the whole of Austria, at the end of 1924, km. 31,252, equal to km. 37.2 every 100 sq. Km. and km. 4.8 every 1000 residents These figures are quite remarkable, if one thinks of the predominantly mountainous nature of the territory and the location of the inhabited centers, almost all located on the valley floor, so the main network is arranged in large meshes along the natural directions of movement. After Vorarlberg and Salzburg, the best served provinces for ordinary communications are Lower Austria with 9.2 km. every 1000 residents and then immediately the Tyrol (5.4), in spite of its great mountain masses, Carinthia (4.8) and Styria (3.8); while Upper Austria (3.2) and Burgenland (2.9) are relatively scarce, although they also have a large part of flat land.

The first Austrian railway line was that of Semmering, inaugurated in 1854 and extended in 1857 for Graz up to Trieste. In 1867 the Brenner one was completed; in 1873 the third transversal line was built, from Bohemia to Trieste to Vienna; in 1879 the Italian line to Pontebba was inaugurated, but the longitudinal ones along the Danube were already ready, from Passau to Linz, Vienna and Presburgo, the other of the Pusteria from Fortezza to Klagenfurt to Marburg, and then the one from Wörgl in Inn valley, Bischofshofen (Salzburg), Selztal (Enns valley) and Leoben (Mur valley) to unite Tyrol with Vienna; and finally in 1884 the Arlberg railway from Innsbruck to Bregenz on Lake Constance was inaugurated. All these lines more or less followed the natural route of the carriage-free communications, but between 1905-1908 the new Tauern and Karavanke line was built, to put Linz and Bohemia in direct communication with Trieste. Today even the Austrian railway network, within the new borders, is but a set of fragments of a larger organization, created for the economy of the great empire and destined to connect its agricultural, mining and industrial regions (Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Hungary) with the Alpine regions, as well as the capital with Trieste. There were also international lines from west to east crossing at Vienna, which served to make this the center of communications with Eastern Europe. The new state has preserved only the westernmost trunks of this network, in a mountainous and costly operation area, and of the international lines only six sections cut by the new borders without regard to traffic needs (such as the one from Vienna to Trieste), and with the main crossing stations in foreign territory: Gmünd, Břeclav (Lundenburg) and Bratislava in Czechoslovakia, Győr (Raab) and Sopron (Ödenburg) in Hungary, Marburg and Jesenice (Assling) in Yugoslavia. The Austrian railway network was at the end of 1924, of km. 6610, i.e. 1 km. every 12.65 sq. km. and 987 residents These are notable figures in themselves, for an essentially Alpine state (km. 7.9 every 100 kmq.; Italy 6.9 km.), To which km. 399 of narrow-gauge railways and inter-provincial tramways, insufficient above all for the traffic of the Alpine provinces, where, as in the Tyrol, there are barely km. 3.7 of railway for every 100 sq. Km. surface; 5.8 km. of railways you have in Salzburg; 6.5 and 6.3 in Styria and Carinthia, pure industrial regions, while there are km. 9.3 and 11.8 in Upper and Lower Austria, flat and densely inhabited regions (783 and 650 residents per km of railway), and Burgenland, with 7.6 km. every 100 sq. km. of surface and 929 residents for every km., it represents one of the best served provinces. For Austria 2003, please check computerannals.com.

Today the most important longitudinal lines for traffic are: the Passau-Vienna-Presburgo, section of the international communication London-Paris-Vienna-Balkan Peninsula (Passau-Vienna 5 hours); the Vienna-Leoben-Villach-Tarvisio for communications with Italy (9 am); the Vienna-Leoben-Selztal-Bischofshofen-Wörgl-Innsbruck-Arlberg-Constance, for communications with Switzerland (3 pm). The trunks of two traversal lines were then left to Austria: Břeclav (Lundenburg) – Vienna – Graz – Marburg – Trieste of the great artery from Bohemia to the Adriatic (Vienna-Trieste at 2 pm); and the other Salzburg – Schwarzach -Villacco – Jesenice (Assling) – Piedicolle-Trieste for the relations of southern Germany with the Mediterranean (Salzburg-Trieste 11 am). Of these lines are electrified today (1927) km. 161 of the Innsbruck-Bludenz section of the Arlberg railway; km. 108 of the Salzkammergut railway, from Stainach to Attnang, and km. 34 from Innsbruck to Brenner, without counting the less important lines such as the Scharnitz-Innsbruck (km. 34), the Zillertalerbahn (km. 32) and others. However, the electrification of another 350 km has already been decided. of alpine railways; these include the continuation of electrification from Bludenz to Constance, the Salzburg-Schwarzach-St. Weit-Wörgl, as well as Schwarzach-St. Weit-Spittal of the Tauern railway, that is of the railways of the western Austrian group with steep slopes and considerable traffic.

In 1924 the wagon-kilometers traveled were 800,391,000, which carried 108,702,819 people, with an average of km. 33.5 per person and 22,746,459 tons of goods; movement which is reduced by about 30% compared to that of the pre-war period, but which is rapidly gaining, although the exercise is still passive.

The waterways that remained in Austria were, at the end of 1924, km. 1732, of which 874 for the floating of timber, 838 for navigable rivers and 21 for canals, that is a total of km. 2.06 every 100 sq. Km. of surface. The maximum length of the waterways belongs to Upper and Lower Austria, which are crossed by the Danube for almost 350 km. in length, of which 200 are well navigable, the others in need of improvement, but which are crossed by passenger and cargo steamers from Passau to Presburgo. Downstream from Vienna, navigation is possible for steamboats with a capacity from 650 to 1000 tons, with draft up to 2 meters; upstream of Vienna some rocks prevent navigation for steamboats with a draft from 1.3 to 1.2 m. In 1924 270,000 tons were loaded in the Austrian ports of the Danube. of goods and 835,000 tons were unloaded, while there were 280,000 of them in transit; then there was a movement of 700,000 passengers. Of the other provinces only Carinthia has 4 km. of regular steam services, while Styria has 123 navigable towpaths, Salzburg 45 and Tyrol only 15; but Styria, Carinthia and Tyrol benefit from many alpine rivers for the floating of the timber (km. 331; 254; 142).