The First Railway to Prague

JAN 01 1845 · 12:00

Jan Perner, Czech engineer who surveyed the Olomouc–Prague stretch of the Kaiser Ferdinand Northern Railway. He rode the inaugural train into Prague on 20 August 1845 and was killed at Choceň the following month, struck while leaning from a carriage in a tunnel. Place: Bohemian State Station (now Masaryk Station / Masarykovo nádraží), New Town Figures: Jan Perner, Czech engineer, chief surveyor of the Olomouc-Prague section (killed in a service accident at Choceň in September 1845) · Archduke Stephen, viceroy of Bohemia, on the inaugural train · Anton von Negrelli, project engineer The Kaiser-Ferdinand-Nordbahn has been creeping north from Vienna since 1837. The Olomouc spur reaches the Moravian capital in 1841. The Prague extension, two hundred and fifty kilometres across rising Bohemian terrain, is the harder piece: three viaducts, eighteen significant cuttings, the long tunnel at Třebovice. Jan Perner, a thirty-year-old engineer from Bratčice, supervises the western half. Drop or rephrase the Negrelli Viaduct reference: the Negrelli Viaduct (1,100 m, then Europe's longest railway bridge) did not open until 1 June 1850, almost five years after the line began running. The 1845 line entered Prague from the east and terminated at the new Bohemian State Station (now Masaryk Station) without crossing the Vltava; the Negrelli Viaduct was built later to extend across the river toward Bubny/Holešovice. The first scheduled train pulls into the Bohemian State Station at 1:15 in the afternoon. Archduke Stephen and a delegation of the Bohemian Estates disembark; a brass band plays the imperial anthem; the assembled crowd is reportedly larger than the one that greeted Ferdinand I's coronation as King of Bohemia in 1836. Within forty-eight hours, regular passenger and freight service to Olomouc and onward to Vienna is operating. The journey from Prague to Vienna, which has taken three to four days by mail coach, now takes about sixteen hours.