For a brief moment in 2024, you could travel directly from Italy to Croatia by train through Slovenia’s rolling Karst Plateau.

Economically, it was a failure, because:

• It departed from a place no one has heard of
• Headed for a place very few people want to visit
• And ticket prices were different on every "leg" of the journey

Being unable to offer advanced ticket sales and card payments, leaving at 7:50am (an unholy time for holidaymakers), and offering only one service per day, were all other inconveniences that damaged its chances of success.

This train ran for a total of 160 days, between April and September, carrying a paltry, 8,000 passengers during its brief life—an average of just 50 per day.

I was one of them.

The service is a small anachronism of travel now, but catching it was a fun story worth telling.

(If you landed here searching for specific instructions on how to get from Italy to Croatia by train, you can find all the details you need on this page on the Man In Seat 61's site that specifically explains how to get from Rome to Ljubljana and Zagreb.)

Leaving from Villa Opicina. Not Trieste

The outbound service departed from a small patch of terra incognita that the inhabitants call Villa Opicina.

It’s a tiny town in the hills above Italy’s port city of Trieste.

Villa Opicina has its own station, 3 miles from and 330 metres above Trieste Centrale, a well-connected station from which more passengers might have caught the train.

However, the service was operated by Slovenian Railways (Slovenske železnice), and technical differences between Italy’s and Slovenia’s railway infrastructure prevented its departure from Trieste Centrale.

So, only the earliest risers and keenest train buffs stood any reasonable chance of catching the morning service to Croatia, by situating themselves the previous night in Trieste or Villa Opicina.

A scenic ride from Italy to Croatia by train

I caught the train in question in late September, during the last few weeks of its scheduled trial run.

There was no buzz or fanfare on the platform before boarding, just a nondescript little train dwarfed by freight rolling stock, with an orange dot matrix sign displaying its destination, Rijeka.

I’ve dragged my girlfriend away from Trieste’s art nouveau cafés for this trip.

“Due biglietti per Rijeka, per favore” (two tickets to Rijeka, please).

Several hundred metres above sea level, the late summer season had come to a premature end.

The ferns and bracken were dying off and turning brown, while the sycamores and maples were putting on a dazzling costume display of yellows and greens—those key lime pie colours of early autumn.

Daggers of clear sunshine made a stylish pair of Italian shades a must-have.

Plumes of fog evaporated in columns from the surrounding forests and thickened into a cloud inversion that we occasionally rose above.

The journey lasted around two hours.

Apart from the final half an hour, the view was almost entirely forest and mountains, punctuated by semaphore signals and small Slovenian towns.

As the train started a noticeable descent from the plateau to the sea, the hazy blue waters of the Kvarner Gulf came into view.

Clusters of terracotta roofs demarcated exclusive-looking hilltop neighbourhoods and the sorts of seaside towns known only to the locals.

Occasionally, we passed close enough to the roads to see people smiling and enjoying their ice creams.

Pulling into Rijeka

Continuing its descent, the train chugged defiantly past everything attractive and inviting, and dumped its passengers next to a four-storey citadel of scrap metal deep in the heart of Rijeka’s docklands.

Scrap, and the heavy machinery needed to load it off and onto the hulking great container ships lurking offshore, made me think the train’s final destination was either incidental or a logistical afterthought.

For several miles, we passed a number of mouthwatering spots that boasted expansive views of the gulf.

Some of them even had train stations.

Croatia back to Italy. Let the absurdities begin

The return journey that evening passed almost entirely in darkness, turning it into a dull commute.

Border bureaucracy meant that passengers could not buy a single ticket valid for the entire journey back to Italy.

Instead, they had to purchase (in cash) a ticket that was valid only until the last stop in Croatia, a second ticket once the train passed into Slovenia, and a third ticket before the train entered Italy.

Added together, the price of these three split tickets was almost double the price of the outbound single fare (€8) that was valid for the entire journey.

Absurdly, passengers were never warned about this silly idiosyncrasy.

Caught off guard, my girlfriend and I barely had enough change to pay for our six return tickets, having naively assumed the price of the return journey would be the same as the outbound one.

Being taken for a drug smuggler

Not long after setting off, a sulky Croatian border guard climbed aboard and shouted at me to show him my passport.

I had (and still have) long ginger hair, and my day bag had a floral design on it.

In his mind, this was incontrovertible proof that I was at best a stoner and, at worst, a drug smuggling kingpin.

He demanded I empty my day bag and show him its contents.

In a funny twist, I had visited a bakery in Croatia and, out of respect for hygiene, picked my buttery, savoury börek using the clear plastic gloves offered by the store.

Not expecting it to ever cause me a problem, I shoved the gloves into my day bag, thus filling it with an herbaceous odour concentrated to marijuana-like levels.

Convinced that I was guilty of possessing illegal drugs, the border guard sniffed everything thoroughly while glaring at me.

In the end, it was the pastry crumbs on the gloves that saved me from arrest and deportation.

Being taken for a drug smuggler twice

Just as I had finished repacking the contents of my day bag, a Slovenian border guard got on and demanded that I fetch it all out again.

Exasperated but amused, I told him that I had just done this a few minutes ago for a Croatian border guard.

“It’s a different country.”

Well, he’s got me there.

I didn’t bother to pack it again after that, and I left the contents laid out around my lap for convenient inspection.

The guns of Villa Opicina

My more interesting travel stories, such as my walk to Tijuana, have a knack of featuring massive guns, and this one is no different.

Once the train arrived back at the station in Villa Opicina, a squadron of SMG-toting carabinieri boarded it, searching for drugs and illegal immigrants.

I suppose arriving from a major foreign port makes this train a good route for smuggling contraband.

It was dark and quiet at the station, and I half expected them to stop my girlfriend and I for questioning, but they didn’t.

Unsurprisingly, the Villa Opicina–Rijeka service didn’t return for 2025.

The views on the outbound journey were stunning, but that’s where my praise for the journey ends.

Rijeka boasts a pretty canal and harbour, and some stunning hikes, but there are much more dramatic destinations to visit in the Balkans.

And only freight train hoppers would prefer a port city over the more exotic destinations on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, such as Split or Dubrovnik, which I assume is where everyone else would prefer their train to terminate.