The Pressburgerbahn is a fascinating railway, only 47 kms long today, but with a great variety of names for the places it served, locomotives, electric currents and gauges! At the time that the railway was promoted, it was planned to connect Vienna with Pozsany, which is the Hungarian name (as it was Hungarian at that time) for Pressburg, which was the German name for what today is known by its Slovak name as Bratislava. Throughout this article I will call it Bratislava for simplicity.
The Austro - Hungarian Empire was huge, it included Czech republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Romania, parts of Italy, parts of Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Montenegro and most of Poland. It was said that the national anthem was sung in 14 different languages! Keeping this very mixed and volatile Empire together needed good transport and communications, especially between the capital cities of Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Bratislava (which was the capital of Hungary from 1526 to 1784 and their parliament sat there until 1848).
The Empire collapsed totally in 1918, and names and borders changed as countries asserted themselves and reclaimed territory from the Empire.
In Roman times an important road connected Vienna (Vindobona in Latin) to Carnuntum, which today is Petronell / Carnuntum, and station on the line. There are large Roman remains, walls, buildings, and over 20 million artefacts unearthed so far. Carnuntum was one of the largest cities in the whole roman empire. The Romans brought wine making to the area and today superb wines are produced in the Carnuntum / Hainburg area. They extended the road to Bratislava. In 1730 there was a regular post coach service between Vienna, Schwechat, Fischamend, Regelsbrunn, Altenburg, and Bratislava and on to Ofen (the German name for what is now known as Budapest), and in 1866 the road, known as the “Pressburger Reichstrasse” was paved throughout.
Railways came early
