Rails of the Last Empires

I’ve had this idea, for years now, one I’ve realized will take a few more years to come to fruition: to ride the rails, take the train, from Moscow to Beijing, through Mongolia. Rails of the Last Empires, I call it, thinking of the collapsed Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese empires of history, their modern counterparts notwithstanding.

Of course, empires have been everywhere, and arguably continue today, even if it’s not polite to call them that anymore. Furthermore, today some empires may be corporate, or online and virtual.

When my boyfriend and I put together a vacation in Europe for 2019, I realized it was also on rails and toured one of the last empires: The Habsburgs.

The Habsburg Empire

There is a lot you can read about the Habsburgs; trust me, the Wikipedia page alone gets rather picayune, and in any case there wasn’t ever a proper “Habsburg Empire”; it was more like one family that tended to be in control of proper empires. For thematic purposes, I’ll keep the focus on the “Dual Monarchy” Austro-Hungarian empire and its predecessor, the Holy Roman Empire.

David likes a lot of outdoor adventure sports, but his passion is backcountry skiing. Every spring, he finds a group that hikes or helicopters in to remote mountains, and then skis from one hut to another. This year he was skiing in the Otz Tal region of the Austrian alps, and we decided that I would meet him in Innsbruck, and from there we would journey every other day by rail to Prague, then Vienna, and end our journey in Budapest.