Page - 108 - in Nikola Tesla and the Graz Tech

108 For Graz, the age of the railway began on 21 October 1844 with the opening of the Southern Railway section from Mürzzuschlag to Graz. One of the most important initiators of the Southern Railway connecting the Danube basin and the Adriatic Sea was Franz Xaver Riepl. Born in Graz, he worked as a professor of mineralogy and commodity economics at the Vien- na Polytechnic. In 1824 Archduke Johann commissioned him to reform the iron industry at Erzberg in Styria. Riepl recognised that the invention of the steam railway in England could only be put into practice because the English iron industry had already reached such an advanced level of technology that it was possible to produce railway tracks, steam boilers and locomotives. If Austria wanted to build steam engines, it had to overcome its backwardness beforehand. This in turn necessitated the introduction of hard coal in the smelting in- dustry and the construction of rolling mills based on the English model in- stead of the iron hammers previously used. In Witkowitz/Vitkovice (Czechia) Riepl was able to put his ideas into practice. Finally, he developed the project of a locomotive railway from Vienna via the Ostrava coal district and the salt deposits in Bochnia in Galicia to the Russian border near Brody and from Vienna to Trieste, a stretch of 1,500 kilometres across the Danube Monarchy. Riepl’s Northern Railway was made possible by the banker Salomon Roth- schild. The first section from Floridsdorf to Wagram was opened on 17 Novem- ber 1837. Soon the rails extended from Vienna to the south. In 1842 the first Southern Railway section to Gloggnitz was completed. Carl Ritter von Ghega was responsible for the planning and execution of the fur- ther route to the Adriatic. Without Archduke Johann, however, this railway would not have passed through Styria. It was Johann who created the conditions for the construction of the first railway line crossing the Alps, the Semmering railway.