Georg Wagner

A landscape-format album of Austrian railway photographs, mainly photographed in the early 1980s. At this time, Austrian railways still employed a number of different types of early electric locomotives dating from the 1920s and 1930s; a wide range of engines of different shapes and sizes, all festooned with pantographs, bus-bars, radiators, grilles, wheels in great profusion, jackshafts and coupling rods, bonnets and headlights, mostly as ugly as a box of frogs but possessing distinctive character and charm. It was this variety, coupled with the land-locked position of Austria, with six different railway administrations (at that time) on its borders, plus its situation as a major international destination and one of the few places where traffic from Iron Curtain countries (before 1989) could pass relatively unhindered that made Austrian railways such a fascinating object of study. Almost anything could turn up in Austria, and it often did.

But this is not just a book of pictures of odd engines and cosmopolitan trains. Austrian railway photographers have long been very conscious that their railways ran through unique scenery, and so they set out to incorporate scenic motifs into their work, in ways that would put many later "railway landscape" photographers to shame.

Austria's accession to the EU in 1996 has put a stop to a lot of the variety, because as a major link in the EU's continental transport policy, a lot of money was made available to modernise Austria's railways, catapulting them in less than twenty years from the 1960s to the 2020s (or 2030s by British standards). This book is therefore a beautiful reminder of earlier times for those who saw them (personally, I just caught the tail-end of this era).

Note that a previous edition of this book was published by Franckh' Verlag in Germany under the title "Die ÕBB heute" ('The ÖBB today').… (mehr)