The Opicina Tram: History of a Trieste Icon from 1902 to Today

When we talk about the tram of Opicina we are not simply describing a means of public transport. We are talking about an engineering object that has no equal in Europe, the result of a daring Habsburg dream born at the turn of the twentieth century to connect the city of Trieste with the Karst plateau. Inaugurated on 9 September 1902, this hybrid tram-funicular line has crossed the upheavals of two empires, two world wars, two republics, and remains today the symbol of a city that has chosen, against the grain, to keep alive a small green-painted miracle made of cables, rails and stubbornness.

The orographic obstacle: Trieste, Scorcola and the Karst at the end of the nineteenth century

A city squeezed between the sea and the plateau

At the end of the nineteenth century, Trieste was the great Habsburg port on the Adriatic, the maritime gate of an empire stretching from Bohemia to Galicia. Yet the very thing that gave the city its identity — the Karst plateau falling sheer to the sea — was also its greatest physical limit. Opicina, the village perched at around 329 metres above sea level, was the natural threshold towards Vienna, but reaching it meant climbing the steep slope of the Scorcola hill in just a few kilometres.

The existing rail link, the Vienna–Trieste Meridionale opened in 1857, was forced to loop around in a long arc to overcome the altitude difference: an unsatisfactory solution for daily travel. A direct, fast, urban connection was needed. And, as so often in Habsburg engineering, where the gradient was too steep an exceptional technical solution had to be invented.

The ingenuity of Eugenio Geiringer

The challenge was taken up by Eugenio Geiringer, a Triestine engineer and entrepreneur, a key figure of late-nineteenth-century industrial Trieste. Geiringer not only designed the route: he was also one of the main promoters of the work and a shareholder of the company that built it. He had already built in 1896 his neo-Gothic Castelletto Geiringer on the Scorcola hill, and tradition has it that he calculated the gradient of the first stretch precisely so that the future tram would pass right under his home.

Around his project there were:

• the urban needs of a city growing on the hills
• the commercial needs of merchants who wanted to transport produce from the Vipava valley (then Haidenschaft) more quickly
• the strategic needs of the empire, eager to short-circuit the connection between the port of Trieste and Vienna

A Habsburg engineering masterpiece

Concession, company and construction

The story of the line began officially on 28 October 1901, when Austrian Law No. 183 granted the concession for the construction and operation of a 1,000 mm metre-gauge electric railway between Trieste and Opicina, with a rack-railway section on the steepest stretch. It was the first traction system of its kind designed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, modelled on similar Swiss installations.

On 24 June 1902, the Aktiengesellschaft der Triester Kleinbahnen — the "Joint-Stock Company of the Small Railways of Trieste" — was officially set up in Vienna, with Geiringer himself among its shareholders. Work proceeded quickly: in just over a year the route was laid, the contact line raised, the depot built at Opicina.

The great day: 9 September 1902

On 9 September 1902, with a vast crowd of guests and onlookers, the Elettrovia di Opicina was triumphantly inaugurated. The route ran on a single track from the then Piazza della Caserma — today Piazza Oberdan — to the village of Opicina, with intermediate stops at Piazza Scorcola, Sant'Anastasio and Romagna on the rack section, then Vetta Scorcola, Cologna, Cologna chiesetta, Conconello, Banne, Obelisco, Campo Romano and Via Nazionale to the terminus and depot at Opicina.

The line was structured in three different traction modes:

• the urban flat section, on the road, from Oberdan to Piazza Scorcola
• the rack section of about 800 metres climbing Scorcola at gradients of up to 26%
• the natural adhesion section from Vetta Scorcola up to Opicina, on a private right-of-way

Five two-axle cars built by the Grazer Waggonfabrik, with electrical equipment from the Österreichische Union Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft of Vienna, and three powerful rack locomotives, were ready to climb the Karst.

"E anche el tran de Opcina xe nato disgrazià"

Triumph lasted only a few weeks. On the morning of 10 October 1902, at 7:30, motor car number 4 — the only summer model with open sides and a metal grille — was descending the rack section near the Romagna stop. The brakes failed, the rails were wet with night humidity, the car gathered speed, derailed in the curve and overturned, smashing into the wall of a nearby house. Miraculously, no one was hurt — there were almost no passengers, since work had not yet begun.

The Triestines, faced with that absurd accident, did what they have always done: they turned tragedy into song. Thus was born the most famous of all Triestine dialect songs, El tram de Opcina, whose opening lines run more or less: "E anche el tran de Opcina xe nato disgrazià / vignindo zò per Scorcola 'na casa el ga ribaltà". An entire community condensed the technical failure into a popular myth, transforming the accident from disgrace into an identity badge.

A vital link between sea, Karst and Vienna

Freight, leisure and Habsburg holidays

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the tram fulfilled a dual role. For the Triestine bourgeoisie it was the easiest way to reach Opicina, which had already become a climatic resort awarded a Grand Prix at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition. The Grand Hotel Obelisco welcomed travellers fond of cool air and panoramic views.

At the same time, the tramway carried freight from the Vipava valley (then Haidenschaft, today Ajdovščina in Slovenia): wines, agricultural produce, market goods. A closed grey freight car operated alongside the passenger cars painted Habsburg green.

The 1906 extension to the Transalpine railway

In 1906 the situation became even more interesting. With the opening of the Ferrovia Transalpina, a second rail link between Trieste and Vienna via Gorizia and Villach, Opicina became an important railway hub. The tramway was extended by 1.13 km from its plateau terminus to the new Opicina station, along Via Nazionale and Via di Prosecco. For just over three decades it took passengers from the city centre directly to the international trains. This extension was suppressed in 1938, when the new rolling stock proved incompatible with the route layout.

From rack to cable: the 1928 turning point

After the First World War, with the passage of Trieste to the Kingdom of Italy, the limits of the rack section became impossible to ignore. Traffic was growing, the locomotives were ageing, and the entire mechanism was technically constrained. The decision was made to convert the steepest section into a funicular.

On 28 April 1928, after long testing, the new system entered service. The mechanical part was supplied by the Swiss firm Teodoro Bell & C. of Kriens, Lucerne. The principle is brilliant in its simplicity: under the rails of the upper Vetta Scorcola station a winch was installed, driving a single cable. To each end of the cable were attached two service vehicles, the now-famous carri scudo ("shield-cars") onto which the tramcars lean. While one car climbs the slope pushed by the shield-car, on the opposite track another descends, balanced by the other shield-car: it is the elevator principle, applied to a tramway.

The funicular section is about 799 metres long, with a level difference of around 160 metres and a maximum gradient of 26% (260 per mille). On this stretch the maximum permitted speed is just 10.8 km/h. To allow the two trams to cross each other while moving, a double track was laid over part of the route. Eight years later, in 1935, the original two-axle cars were also replaced by the bogie tramcars of the 401-407 series built by the Officine Meccaniche della Stanga of Padua with TIBB electrical equipment, still in service today — wartime, accidents and modernisations permitting.

The lone survivor: from 1970 to tourist icon

The rescue after the urban network was dismantled

After the war, Italian Trieste lived through the season of the Free Territory and then a long economic and demographic decline. In the 1950s private cars began to erode tramway traffic; in 1961, when the concession of the Società Anonima Piccole Ferrovie expired, the line passed to the municipality, which managed it first through the Servizio Comunale Trenovia, then through ACEGAT (1970), ACT (1977), Trieste Trasporti (2000) and finally the Consorzio TPL FVG (2020). What no other Italian city did, Trieste did: it saved its last tramway. In 1970, when the urban tramway network was dismantled in favour of buses, the Opicina line was preserved as the only survivor — partly out of love, partly out of tourist calculation, partly because there really was no equivalent in Europe.

Today the tram has become a historical monument in motion: the six 1935-1942 cars have been bound by the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio of Friuli Venezia Giulia. Boarding is still done from Barriera Nuova and the city centre, just a few steps from Piazza Oberdan, and after a few hundred metres the entire mechanism of pushing and pulling springs into action.

Recent suspensions and the 2025 reopening

The line's recent history has not been easy. Service was suspended from 3 September 2012 following a derailment without consequences, then resumed on 11 July 2014 after extensive renovation work. But the hardest blow came on 16 August 2016: two cars, 404 and 405, collided head-on near Conconello. Eight passengers and the two drivers were injured. The line stopped — for what would become eight long years.

Repairs and certifications stretched on, partly because spare parts for a 1935-built fleet do not exist on the market and had to be made by hand. On 1 February 2025, the tram finally returned to service from the temporary terminus of Piazza Dalmazia, about a hundred metres before Piazza Oberdan, with a single tramcar — the 401 — to operate the line under tightened safety rules (20 km/h on the natural-adhesion section).

Today, climbing aboard the tram de Opcina is more than just a tram ride. It is a journey backwards through over a century of European history, witnessing the persistence of a small piece of Mitteleuropa that no other European city — not Vienna, not Lyon, not Lisbon — has managed to keep working in the same way. A small Habsburg miracle, painted green, still climbing the Karst.