Steam Trains and Engines

As mentioned on the previous page, electrification came early to Austria, and today almost a third of the route mileage, some eleven hundred miles, is electrified at 15,000 volts. Naturally this has been carried out principally on the important main lines radiating from Vienna, both to the western and southern frontiers of the country, and many of the little-used branch lines are still worked by steam power.

Since these lines are in most cases laid with comparatively light track, the older and smaller locomotives have been retained while the larger, more powerful main-line engines made redundant by electrification have already been scrapped. One of the few passenger designs still in use in Austria is the Class ' 35 ' 2-6-2, a 2-cylinder simple expansion engine built in large numbers by the old State Railway between 1909 and 1917. Formerly Class ' 429 ' of the State Railway, engines of this design formed part of the stock of the Czech, Jugoslav and Italian State Railways after the first war; in 1952 nine of the Italian locomotives, Class ' 688 ' of the F.S. Italia, came back to their original birthplace as Nos. 35.251-9.

About twenty of these elegant machines, and one of the similar 2-cylinder compounds of Class ' 135,' are still in use on the lines of the old Kronprinz Rudolf Bahn, and may well be the very last steam passenger locomotives in use in Austria.