BONUS: $50 COSTCO Gift Card Opportunity

BONUS: $50 COSTCO Gift Card Opportunity

Shortly after the completion of the Leipzig–Dresden railway in 1839, the first plans were developed to continue the route south towards Vienna. The first proposal considered was for a line via Zittau and Liberec (German: Reichenberg) through Upper Lusatia. High costs and the danger that Saxony could be bypassed by such a route led to this project being dropped. Later the German South-North Connecting Railway (Südnorddeutsche Verbindungsbahn) was built on this route. Austria preferred, however, from the start a line through the Elbe valley. Saxony and Austria agreed to this in a treaty signed on 9 August 1842, which provided for a construction time of eight years. On 1 August 1848, the first section of Dresden was opened to Pirna. The first service over the whole Dresden–D??ín line ran on 6 April 1851. Royal Saxon State Railways owned the section to the border only. The rest of the line to D??ín was leased from Austria. In the following years, as part of the Saxon-Bohemian State Railway, it became an important lines in Europe. Much of the north-south traffic connected with the Prussian lines in Upper Silesia. Royal Saxon State Railways A Saxon IIIb in Pötzscha (now Stadt Wehlen) The line below Königstein Fortress Vindobona Express service, comprising high-speed class VT 18.16 DMU, in the late 1970s In 1898 large parts of the railway’s premises in Dresden were refurbished. The line’s old Bohemian station (Böhmische Bahnhof) was demolished and in its place the new Dresden Hauptbahnhof was built. The ground-level route through the city of Dresden was raised to a higher level, allowing a number of level crossings to be removed. Section by section, the Dresden–Pirna line was expanded to four tracks from 1915, allowing a separation of long-distance and regional services. Suburban trains ran every 15 minutes between Dresden and Pirna. After the Second World War After the end of World War II on 8 May 1945, the portion of the state border to D??ín was taken over by the Czechoslovak State Railways (CSD). All passenger trains from Dresden now terminated at Schöna station before the national border. CSD served its own section of the line from then on with passenger trains from D??ín to Dolní Žleb. On 20 May 1945 German and Czech railway workers were advised that rail operations would resume across the re-established border. However, at first only freight trains operated, with a service between Berlin and Prague starting in 1946. Large parts of the German railway tracks were dismantled in the course of 1946, as reparations to the Soviet Union. As a result, the Dresden–Schöna section was reduced to a single track throughout. Rehabilitation and reconstruction Between 1949 and 1951, the second track was rebuilt. At the end of the 1950s double-decker commuter trains were introduced to the route. Gradually, high-quality long-distance trains returned to the through route. From the late 1950s, an international express service, called Vindobona ran on the line between Berlin and Vienna. Other services on the line included the [Hungaria (Berlin–Budapest) and the Pannonia Express (Berlin-Sofia). Freight traffic also increased steadily. Visa-free travel between East Germany and Czechoslovakia was introduced on 1 January 1972. On 29 January 1972, a passenger train pair ran between Dresden and D??ín for the first time since 1945. At the same time an express service was introduced to Prague which allowed day trippers to visit the Czech capital of Prague. From 1973 the line from Dresden to Pirna was integrated into the new S-Bahn tariff zone. In subsequent years, the Dresden–Pirna line was restored as a four-track line in preparation for the conversion of Dresden suburban services into a real S-Bahn.