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ith the collapse of the House of Habsburg and the Austrian
empire after the end of the First World War in 1918, the
history of court trains also came to an end. One more time,
the imperial train was used, when the last Austrian emperor, Karl
I, left Austria after his abdication and traveled with his family from
the Kopfstetten-Eckartsau railroad station into exile in Switzerland.
Over the course of several decades, after two devastating wars,
after unthinkable destruction, after worldwide economic crises
and the division of the world into East and West with strong social
and political borders, the Imperial Train disappeared from public
awareness. The world had other problems. Once in a while, former
court train carriages were integrated into the Austrian Federal
Railroads, but overall, the imperial luxury trains were a thing of the
past, mostly forgotten and many even destroyed.
Only the Imperial Dining Car from the Court Train of 1891, which
is exhibited in the Prague Technical Museum, and the first Salon
Carriage of Empress Elisabeth, which can be seen at the Technical
Museum in Vienna, survived.
Photos and designs were preserved for posterity and were
almost entirely forgotten until.…
W
THE END
of the Court Train
The coff ins with the mortal remains of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand und Sophie von Hohenlohe
(U)