Over Gorski kotar — Zagreb to Rijeka

Between Zagreb and the sea stands Gorski kotar, the wooded upland that Croatians call the green heart of the country: fir and beech forest almost without a break, limestone gorges with rivers falling into them, lakes held behind dams at Lokve and Fužine, and bears, wolves and lynx in the woods above the line. The railway spends the middle of its afternoon in it. It climbs out of the Karlovac plain, crosses the Dobra and the upper Kupa country, calls at Vrbovsko and Skrad and Delnice, tops out at 837 metres above the sea, and then falls off the edge of the mountain towards the Kvarner gulf — the last hour on ledges cut into the karst, with the sea widening below and concrete walls along the embankments to hold the wind off the train.

At the bottom of that descent is Rijeka: a working port with a classical station, a promenade called the Korzo, a castle on the hill at Trsat, and the Adriatic at the end of the street. It is 229 kilometres from Zagreb and it takes between four and five hours, which is slow, and the slowness is the entire point. This is one of the great mountain crossings of southern Europe, done on an ordinary ticket, on trains that run every day of the year.

The sea a landlocked kingdom had to borrow

The line exists because of a piece of nineteenth-century constitutional arithmetic. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement of 1868, Rijeka — Fiume — was detached from Croatia and administered directly from Budapest. Hungary had no coast of its own. It had just acquired one town on somebody else's, and it wanted a railway to it.

So Hungary built this line, and built it fast: work began in the middle of 1869 and the first train ran from Karlovac to Rijeka on 23 October 1873, three and a half years later, cut through the mountain by some twenty-three thousand men working with pick, shovel and barrow, with black powder in the tunnels until dynamite arrived near the end. Rails came from France, Belgium, Austria and Hungary, hauled up to the line by horse cart from Rijeka and Karlovac along the two old post roads, the Karolina and the Lujzijana. Before it opened, the winter journey between the two towns by those roads could take several days.

What it bought was immediate. Budapest was suddenly joined to the Adriatic; Rijeka took the trade that had gone to Senj and began to compete with Trieste, which Vienna had connected sixteen years earlier. And when Rijeka's station burned down in 1888, the replacement that opened in 1891 was designed by Ferenc Pfaff, chief architect of the Hungarian Royal State Railways. It is still the building the train stops under.

The train leaves Zagreb Glavni kolodvor and spends its first hour on flat ground — Jastrebarsko, the Kupa, and then Karlovac, the six-pointed star fortress the Habsburgs began in 1579 to hold back the Ottomans, now a town of four rivers with a station on the edge of it. Beyond Duga Resa the valley narrows, the Mrežnica and then the Dobra come alongside, and at Ogulin the mountain begins. Ogulin is the operational heart of the line — one of the three big engine sheds and turntables built for this railway, alongside Moravice and Oštarije — and a few minutes further on, at Oštarije, the Lika railway turns south for Split.

From Ogulin the line climbs steadily for an hour and a half. Vrbovsko, then Moravice, then Brod Moravice, and the country changes completely — spruce and fir, hay meadows in clearings, timber stacked beside the track, and villages of steep-roofed houses built for four months of snow. Skrad sits above one of the finest gorges in the country. Delnice, a little further on, is the main town of Gorski kotar and keeps the railway's rotary snow blower. Past Lokve the line runs through the longest cutting in Croatia — 1,420 metres of rock — and reaches its summit, and then Fužine appears on its promontory above the Bajer reservoir, which is as good as the view from this train gets.

The drop to the Adriatic

After Fužine the railway has to lose eight hundred metres in about thirty kilometres, and it does it the nineteenth-century way: by going a long way round. Lič, Drivenik, Zlobin, Plase, Meja, Škrljevo — the names come slowly because the line is doubling back on itself along the face of the coastal range, and somewhere in there the Kvarner gulf opens out below, with the islands beyond it.

This is also where the bura lives. The cold downslope wind that pours off these mountains onto the Adriatic is violent enough that the embankments on the descent are built with concrete and masonry walls along their seaward side to shelter passing trains, and the exposed edges of Gorski kotar carry snow fences for the other half of the year. Both are original railway furniture and both are still doing their job.

The last few kilometres run through the suburbs of Rijeka above the Rječina, past Sušak-Pećine, and into a station whose platform is 352 metres long and whose canopy is 155 — built for a port that in 1913 was the tenth-busiest in Europe.

Slower than it was in 1982

The first trains took nine and a half hours from Zagreb to Rijeka in 1873. By the 1930s it was five and a half. In 1982 the run was three and a half hours. Today the fastest train on the timetable takes four hours and seven minutes, and the stopping train takes nearly five.

Nothing has gone wrong, exactly. The line is single track for its whole length and it was laid out for the traffic of the 1870s. Croatia's transport ministry puts it plainly: the line "was opened for traffic in 1873, and according to exploitation it is one of the most difficult railway lines in Europe due to the fact that its technical characteristics do not meet the demands of transport". Everything done since — including electrification, which began at Matulji in 1936 with the oldest traction substation in the country and was not fully converted to 25 kV until 2012 — has been done to a track alignment that cannot be straightened.

The answer is a new railway rather than a faster one. The nizinska pruga, the "lowland line", is a double-track route that will eventually replace this one between Zagreb and Rijeka; the ministry's design speed is 160 to 200 km/h, the Zagreb–Karlovac geometry is being set out so that over 250 km/h would be possible later, and the aim is a Rijeka–Zagreb journey of about an hour. It is being built in pieces. The first, Hrvatski Leskovac to Karlovac, is 44 kilometres of reconstruction and second track; eight of its eleven stages are complete, and in April 2026 HŽ Infrastruktura signed the contract for the remaining three, worth €278.8 million before VAT, with thirty-six months to finish. The mountain sections beyond it are still at the design stage.

Which means the ride described on this page has years left in it, and then it becomes a branch line, or a memory. For now the train still goes over the top.

What runs on it

The trains are locomotive-hauled: a blue HŽPP class 1141 electric on the front and ordinary coaches behind. Between Ogulin and Rijeka there are more local trains than through ones, which is the sensible way to read this timetable — the mountain is better served than the journey across it. And Delnice keeps a rotary snow blower on the strength of the winters up here, which is the clearest statement anyone has made about what 837 metres means in this part of Europe.

Every time below is read from HŽPP's own timetable feed, downloaded on 16 August 2026, and checked against the operator's live traffic notices of the same week. The timetable period runs from 14 December 2025 to 12 December 2026; the third set of amendments to it came into force on 14 June 2026.

There are two through trains a day from Zagreb to Rijeka and two back, plus a Sunday working, and they run all year. HŽPP's own seaside page makes the point without ceremony: for Rijeka and Pula, passengers "can travel in regular trains". There is no summer special on this line, and none is needed.

Zagreb to Rijeka

702 is the one to take if the object is Rijeka — four hours and seven minutes, fourteen stops. 4000 is the one to take if the object is the railway: it calls forty-seven times, takes four hours and fifty-three, and is on the mountain in the middle of the day.

Rijeka to Zagreb

1701 is a Sunday-only train, and it disappears for the summer. In the 2026 timetable it runs on Sundays up to 14 June and again from 27 September, and not on the Sundays in between. On the weekdays of term time the same path exists as train 4605, but it stops at Oštarije at 13:57 and goes no further.

Over the mountain only — Ogulin to Rijeka

The Gorski kotar section has more trains than the through journey does. If the mountain is the point, these are useful, and Zagreb–Ogulin is well served separately.

Two more journeys, by changing at Ogulin

Both of these run daily, and both put a train over Gorski kotar at a time the through services do not.

• Zagreb 13:08 (train 4054) — Ogulin 15:31; 4606 leaves Ogulin at 15:44 and is in Rijeka at 18:09. Thirteen minutes to change.
• Rijeka 07:25 (train 4603) — Ogulin 09:52; 4059 leaves Ogulin at 10:00 and is in Zagreb at 12:34. Eight minutes to change.

A day on the line

There is no comfortable there-and-back in one day, and it is worth knowing that before booking. 703 out of Rijeka at 05:17 and 702 back from Zagreb at 16:12 is the only same-day pair, and it means a five-in-the-morning start. From Zagreb, the honest shape of this trip is 4000 down at 08:30 and a night in Rijeka, with 703 or 4001 the following day.

A shorter version that does work in a day, every day of the week: Zagreb 08:30 to Delnice at 12:07 on 4000, and 4001 back out of Delnice at 14:55, into Zagreb at 18:30. That is under three hours on the ground, which is enough for the town and lunch, and it puts both crossings of the mountain in daylight.

Track work

At the time of writing the operator's notice board lists no closures on the Zagreb–Rijeka line itself. The engineering blocks currently published are on other routes out of Zagreb — Sesvete and Dugo Selo, Križevci to the Hungarian border — and on the Karlovac–Ozalj–Kamanje branch, which is bus-operated until 12 December 2026 and is a different line that happens to start in the same station.

*Times as of August 2026. HŽPP publishes the timetable, the live traffic notices and the engineering works at hzpp.hr (opens in a new tab), and the notice board is worth a look on the morning of travel.*

This is an ordinary domestic journey on an ordinary domestic ticket, with no supplement and no compulsory reservation — the operator names the Split trains as the ones that need a seat booked, and the Rijeka trains are not among them. Buying online is 10 per cent cheaper than at the counter, and ticket machines are thin on the ground: the only one on this journey is at Zagreb Main Station.

Two standing offers apply. The operator's "to the seaside by rail" page takes 40 per cent off tickets bought at its ticket offices and names Rijeka; separately, a prepaid smart card takes a further 50 per cent off second-class fares at weekends. Validity is unusually generous at this distance — a one-way ticket lasts two days and a return six, so a return bought on a Monday is still alive on Saturday. Rules read from HŽPP, 16 August 2026.

A rail pass is not the way to do this journey, and the reasons are worth setting out because they are specific rather than general.

The Croatia One Country Pass

Interrail's Croatia Pass covers HŽPP's whole network, this line included, and there is nothing on these trains that a pass holder has to pay extra for — no supplement, no compulsory reservation, no first-class-only working. A pass holder simply gets on.

The catch is the condition Interrail states itself: "Interrail One Country Passes are designed for travel within a single selected country and cannot be used to enter or leave that country." A Croatia pass is for travelling inside Croatia. It cannot carry anyone in from Ljubljana, Vienna or Budapest, and it cannot be bought at all by someone resident in Croatia.

So the arithmetic is simple. This is a single domestic journey of 229 kilometres, sold as one ordinary ticket and 10 per cent cheaper again online. A pass that has to earn its price back over three or four travel days will not do it on one crossing of Gorski kotar, and it will not do it on a return either, because the return ticket is valid six days and covers the same ground.

When a pass does start to make sense

A pass earns its keep on this line only as part of a longer Croatian itinerary — Zagreb to Rijeka, then Zagreb to Split down the Lika railway, then the summer night train to Osijek, over a week or so. Four or five long domestic runs in a fortnight is roughly where the sums turn.

The Global Pass

An Interrail Global Pass is a different proposition, because it does carry its holder across the border, and Croatia is one of its countries. For anyone arriving from Ljubljana, Vienna or Budapest and continuing over the mountain to the Adriatic, it works normally here, and the same absence of supplements applies — the pass is shown, the train is boarded.

Pass conditions read from interrail.com, 20 August 2026. No fare or pass price is quoted on this page — both change, and neither would be worth trusting six months from now.

Almost everything worth stopping for on this line is within walking distance of a platform, which is a consequence of the railway having arrived before the tourism did. Karlovac's star fortress, Ogulin's chasm, the gorge at Skrad, the deepest show cave in the country at Lokve — all of them are reached from a station the train calls at, and the trail into the Skrad gorge literally begins at the station gate.

The six below run in order from Zagreb. Two of them, Skrad and Lokve, are protected areas in the county's care, opened by concession-holders and worth a telephone call before setting out; the mountain between them is a national park declared in 1949. Rijeka at the end is a working port with a castle above it on the site of an Illyrian and Roman fort, and a promenade at sea level, and it is the only place on the list that wants a full day rather than an afternoon.

The shape of this journey settles the question of where to sleep. There is no comfortable same-day return from Zagreb, so a night at the Rijeka end is not a luxury but the way the timetable works. And because the two through trains sit either side of the middle of the day, a night in Gorski kotar turns one long ride into two good ones — down to Fužine or Delnice on the morning train, out again the next day.

Three below, one at each end and one on the mountain. Each takes bookings directly and each stands in the middle of its own town rather than in a resort complex. No price, rating or star count is given for any of them, because none of that has been verified — what is here is what the hotels say about themselves.

Zagreb's main square is a walk of about ten minutes from Zagreb Glavni kolodvor, up through the chain of park squares laid out in front of the station, and anything on it can be reached with a bag. Fužine is much the smallest of the three towns, and its hotel is also the village restaurant, which in Gorski kotar counts for a good deal. Rijeka's centre lies just behind its station, with the Korzo a few minutes' walk from the platform.