Munich to Venice
The Brenner Pass Alpine Express

Munich Hauptbahnhof is one of Germany's busiest stations - a sprawling structure beneath Bayerstraße that has been rebuilt, expanded, and patched into its current form over more than a century. It lacks the architectural bravura of Berlin Hbf or Vienna Westbahnhof, but it compensates with efficiency: 450,000 passengers daily, 32 platforms, and direct connections south to Austria that have run continuously since the 1860s.

The journey south begins through Munich's suburbs - the city sprawls into market gardens and light industry before the Bavarian countryside reasserts itself. Within 30 minutes of departure, the first Alpine foothills appear ahead: low, rounded summits draped in dark spruce, with Bavarian farmhouses and onion-domed churches in the valleys. The light is distinctly different from northern Germany - clearer, more saturated, the sky closer to the mountains.

Munich to Venice is one of the great transcontinental rail journeys - a six-hour arc from Bavarian beer halls to Venetian canals.

Innsbruck Hauptbahnhof sits at the floor of the Inn Valley at 574 metres, surrounded on all sides by the Karwendel and Tux Alps. The city is immediately, viscerally dramatic: step out of the station and the Nordkette mountain chain - its upper slopes often snow-covered - rises directly above the rooftops. Most services stop here for five to eight minutes, long enough to notice the altitude and the quality of the air.

South of Innsbruck the line begins to climb. The Brenner Pass at 1,370 metres is the lowest Alpine crossing available to rail, which is part of why it has been used as a transit corridor since Roman times. The gradient is manageable but persistent - the train works its way up through the Wipptal, a narrow gorge where the motorway and railway compete for the same valley floor, past ski resorts and old mining villages.

The Brenner Pass at 1,370 metres: the lowest crossing in the Alps, used without interruption since the Roman legions marched south to Italy.

At the summit - marked by a small station and a ski resort - the watershed divides the waters of Europe. Everything north drains to the North Sea; everything south to the Adriatic. The train descends into the Adige Valley and Italy begins: the station signage switches to Italian, the architecture shifts from Tyrolean to Italianate, and the landscape opens into the wide, terraced vine-country of South Tyrol. Bolzano - the bilingual capital of this former Austrian territory - sits in a bowl of rock faces and vineyard terraces at 262 metres. The Dolomites appear to the east: pale, serrated, unlike any other mountains in Europe.

The approach to Venice across the Ponte della Libertà is a moment that rail travel holds exclusive rights to. The lagoon appears on both sides of the train simultaneously as the four-kilometre causeway crosses the shallow water, and the city - a skyline of campanile, domes, and terracotta - materialises ahead from nothing. It is one of the great theatrical arrivals in European travel.

Venezia Santa Lucia is the terminus. The train ends here, the buffers twenty metres from the Grand Canal, and you step from the carriage into an air that smells of salt water and canal. The station's neoclassical facade opens directly onto the water - within thirty seconds of leaving your seat you can be watching gondolas and vaporetti from the station steps.

This is the crucial distinction between arriving by train and arriving by plane. Venice Marco Polo airport sits 12 kilometres north-east across the lagoon - a water taxi costs €45–€120, a shared ACTV bus ferry takes 45–75 minutes. The train arrives on the islands. You are already there.