The Šumava Border Railway

Most border stations sit near a border. This one has the border inside it.

When the reception building at Železná Ruda-Alžbětín was finished in 1878, its centre section was set exactly on the line between Bavaria and Bohemia, with a wing on either side belonging to the railway administration of the country it stood in. The symmetry was the whole design. To this day the building carries two national postal addresses — Bahnhofstraße 54 in Bayerisch Eisenstein, and Debrník 30 in Železná Ruda.

For most of the twentieth century that arrangement stopped being a courtesy and became a problem to be solved with materials. Passenger trains across the frontier ended in 1945. In 1953 Czechoslovakia drew a wire fence across the track layout, the rails were cut, goods traffic finished that September, and walls inside the building completed the division. The Iron Curtain ran through a waiting room. It stayed there for thirty-eight years, until the crossing reopened to rail on 2 June 1991.

Getting there is a proper journey in its own right. The line climbs 97 kilometres from Plzeň up the Úhlava valley into the Bohemian Forest, and near the top it disappears into the Špičák tunnel — 1,747 metres bored between 1874 and 1877, and the longest railway tunnel in Austria-Hungary when it opened. It held the record on Czech territory for 130 years.

What it is not is a restored through route. Shuttles did run across the border to Špičák from 28 May 2006, but that service ended in December 2014. The German train from Plattling terminates in the building; the Czech train for Klatovy and Prague starts in it. Passengers change by walking from one country to the other, indoors, without going outside at all.

The railway leaves Plzeň heading south, and for the first stretch it is an ordinary main line — electrified at 25 kV 50 Hz, under wires strung as recently as 21 September 1996. This is farmland and small towns: Dobřany, Chlumčany, Přeštice. The mountains are somewhere ahead and not yet in the frame.

What works the line matters here, because the change of traction is visible from the platform. The electric section is worked by ordinary units out of Plzeň; beyond Klatovy the through expresses are usually in the hands of a class 754 diesel — built between 1975 and 1980, and known to Czech railwaymen as the Brejlovec, the spectacle-wearer, after a front end that looks like a pair of glasses. Eighty-six were built before a factory fire stopped production in July 1980, and their numbers are falling as more of the network is electrified. The local trains up the valley are lighter railcars.

Klatovy, about halfway, is where the character changes. It is the largest town on the route and the end of the electrification: beyond it the remaining 48 kilometres are worked by diesel. A through express pauses here for a good ten minutes, long enough that the break feels deliberate rather than operational.

Up the Úhlava

From Klatovy the line follows the Úhlava upstream through Janovice nad Úhlavou and Nýrsko, and the valley closes in. The gradient stiffens toward its maximum of 21.7 per mille — not severe by mountain-railway standards, but sustained, and the note of the engine changes with it. Zelená Lhota and Hojsova Stráž are small halts among spruce, the sort of stops where one or two people get off and the forest takes them immediately.

Then the tunnel. The Špičák tunnel is 1,747 metres long, driven between 1874 and 1877 under the direction of Karl Pascher von Osserburg, its portals at roughly 840 and 845 metres above the sea. It was the longest railway tunnel in Austria-Hungary at its opening, and it remained the longest anywhere on Czech territory for 130 years, until the Březenský tunnel beat it in 2007 by eleven metres. The Ejpovický tunnel of 2018, at 4,150 metres, has since pushed it to third. Trains take it at 60 km/h, so the crossing lasts under two minutes.

It is worth knowing who dug it. The workforce was brought from across the empire — from Bosnia, Dalmatia, Croatia and Tyrol — and several dozen of them died during the work. They are buried at the Barabů cemetery near Železná Ruda, which is still there in the trees.

The three stations of Železná Ruda

Out of the southern portal the line reaches Špičák, at the top of the climb, and then drops through Železná Ruda město and Železná Ruda centrum — a town of a few thousand people with three stations on one railway, which tells you what the line was built to serve. Below the town the Železnorudský tunnel, 198 metres, takes the railway on its last stretch to the frontier.

And then the terminus, which is the reason to come. From the platform the building reads as a single long range: a tall gable at one end, a lower wing running away from it, a canopy over the platform face. Nothing about it announces that a state boundary passes through the middle. The Czech half belongs to Správa železnic and was renovated outside in 2018 and inside in 2019; the German half was bought by the Naturpark Bayerischer Wald in 2006 and rebuilt between spring 2010 and mid-2011 at a cost of €5.14 million. It was named Bahnhof des Jahres — station of the year — in 2017.

The connection that is a border crossing

The practical business of the place is worth watching. Czech trains work in and out of tracks on their side; the Bavarian services stand at their own platform in the green and yellow of the Waldbahn, worked by Regio-Shuttle railcars. A sign in the station marks the Betriebsführungsgrenze — the limit of operational control, where responsibility for the track passes from one country's infrastructure manager to the other. Nothing runs through. A passenger going onward from Prague to Bavaria walks the length of a building, crosses an international frontier somewhere around the middle of it, and boards a train belonging to another country's operator — having never been outdoors, shown a document, or done anything that felt like crossing a border at all.

Times below were read from the live timetable for Tuesday 18 August 2026, and checked again against Tuesday 10 November 2026, which returned an identical pattern — so this is the ordinary year-round service rather than a summer one. As of August 2026.

From the border station toward Bohemia

Departures from Železná Ruda-Alžbětín:

The two R workings are line R16, the through expresses, and they call at Klatovy, Přeštice, Plzeň, Rokycany, Hořovice, Beroun and Praha-Smíchov on the way in. R 763's calendar reads daily.

From Prague to the border

That is the useful shape of the day: leave Prague at six and you are at the frontier before ten, with the whole day in the mountains; leave at noon and you arrive in the middle of the afternoon.

The Bavarian side of the same building

Die Länderbahn's Waldbahn service RB35 runs down to Plattling via Zwiesel and Deggendorf, taking a little over an hour, and departs at roughly the same minute past each hour through the day — 07:08 and 07:42, then 08:42, 09:42, 10:42, 11:42, 12:42, 13:42, 14:42, 15:42, 16:42, 17:42, 18:42, 19:42, 20:42 and 21:40.

⚠️ No train runs through. The German departures terminate at the border station and the Czech ones begin there, so any journey from Bavaria into Bohemia by this route involves a change on foot inside the building. Allow a few minutes for it — the walk is longer than a normal cross-platform connection.

A summer extra worth mentioning: an Sp pair, 1702 and 1707, works directly to and from Plzeň (Plzeň 07:00 → 08:59; 17:40 → Plzeň 19:34). These did not appear on the November board, so they do not run all year.

Timetables in Czechia change with the December national timetable, and the operators publish the current version: České dráhy (opens in a new tab) for the Czech trains and Die Länderbahn (opens in a new tab) for the Waldbahn.

Nothing about this journey needs booking in advance. Both halves are ordinary scheduled services on ordinary tickets, and neither requires a reservation. On the Czech side České dráhy sells the whole run from Prague or Plzeň as a single ticket, and buying online is generally cheaper than at a counter; a seat can be reserved on the expresses for a small supplement, worth it only on a summer weekend when the trains fill with walkers. On the Bavarian side the RB35 is part of the ordinary German regional network, so the Deutschlandticket and Bavaria's day tickets apply.

⚠️ One thing catches people out: because no train runs through the border, a single ticket does not span both countries. A journey from Bavaria into Bohemia needs a German ticket to the border station and a Czech one onward. Since the change is a walk across a building rather than a timed connection, that is less awkward than it sounds.

This is a journey where a pass is probably not the answer, and it is worth saying so plainly.

Interrail and Eurail are both valid on České dráhy, including the R16 expresses to the border, and no reservation is compulsory on any train described here — so a pass holder can simply board. The difficulty is arithmetic rather than validity. Plzeň to Železná Ruda-Alžbětín is 97 kilometres of regional railway in a country with low domestic fares, and a single day's use of a pass costs considerably more than the ticket. A pass earns its keep on this line only if the journey is one leg of a much longer trip that is already paying for itself.

The same reasoning applies on the Bavarian side. The RB35 is a regional service in the German fare system, so a pass covers it, but the Deutschlandticket — a flat monthly ticket valid on all regional trains in Germany — covers it too, and for anyone spending a while in Bavaria that is the cheaper instrument by a wide margin.

Because no train crosses the frontier, there is no through product to look for. Whatever you hold on one side stops being relevant at the border, and the second half of the journey is a separate transaction.

⚠️ Pass conditions and prices change; the terms above were current as of August 2026 and are published by the pass issuers and by the two operators.

The Bohemian Forest — Šumava in Czech, the Böhmerwald on the other side of the ridge — is one of the largest areas of continuous woodland in central Europe, and this railway runs into the middle of it. What the line offers is unusually compact: a mountain town with three stations, two glacial lakes within walking distance of one of them, and, at the terminus, a building that is itself the main sight.

The stops below are all reachable from the railway without a car. Železná Ruda's three stations put the town, the lakes and the border station within a few minutes of one another, and Klatovy makes the natural halfway break for anyone taking the line in two parts rather than one.

Železná Ruda is a working mountain resort rather than a place with a grand railway hotel, and the accommodation reflects that: family-run mountain houses and ski hotels, most of them geared to guests who arrive with skis in winter and boots in summer. Everything below is in or immediately above the town, within a few minutes of one of its three stations.

Two points worth knowing before booking. The town's season is genuinely two seasons — a winter one built around the Belvedere and Špičák slopes, and a summer one built around walking — so rates and opening patterns move with them, and the quiet weeks between the two are quiet indeed. And on the Bavarian side of the frontier, Bayerisch Eisenstein has its own small stock of guesthouses, which is worth remembering if the Czech town is full: they are a walk away, through the station.

⚠️ The cards below carry no prices, ratings or star counts. Each links to the hotel's own website, which is where the current rates live, and each description says only what that site itself states.