Ljubljana to Maribor, Slovenia's busiest line

Ljubljana to Maribor by train

There are three kinds of train on the line. ICS services, tilting Pendolino trains, run only between Ljubljana and Maribor with fewer stops, and carry a €2 supplement bought before boarding or €4 on the train. Then there are trains continuing to Graz and Vienna, which stop in Maribor; the first of the morning, the IC 351, leaves Ljubljana at 5am and stops in Maribor at 7.25am before crossing into Austria. And there are regional trains calling at more stations. All of them run via Zidani Most, Celje and Pragersko. If you get on without a ticket where the booking office was open, expect a €12 penalty. How tickets and supplements work is in trains in Slovenia. For the other options around the country, see getting around Slovenia.

Return times

Counting only the international trains that stop in Maribor, there are departures towards Ljubljana at 9.30am, 11.35am, 1.40pm, 3.35pm, 5.40pm, 7.35pm and 10.48pm, arriving between 12.07pm and 1.04am. Some involve a change. ICS and regional trains add more options; check them in the Slovenske železnice journey planner or the Grem z vlakom app. The domestic fare isn’t published in a fixed table but in the journey planner, so I’d look it up there the day before.

By bus

Intercity buses run between the two cities, since the network fans out from Ljubljana to almost every Slovenian town, and in Maribor the Marprom city network has 17 routes, whose travel card you can pick up at the bus station ticket office or a newsagent’s kiosk. Intercity times are on the Ljubljana bus station website.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Maribor before prices climb.

Maribor as a base for the east

Maribor works well as a second base. Slovenske železnice has one of its four InfoCentre offices there, along with Ljubljana, Celje and Koper, where you can buy international tickets. If you’re carrying on to Hungary, from Maribor you connect at Pragersko with the direct train to Budapest, and if you’re flying, Graz airport is 70 km away according to the Tourist Board.

By car on the motorway

It’s about 126 km on the A1 motorway, roughly 90 minutes on an empty road by my OpenStreetMap calculation, with Celje 76 km from Ljubljana. You need the e-vignette from the first kilometre, explained in the Slovenian vignette. From Maribor, Ptuj is 30 km away and Murska Sobota 57 km. If you’re carrying on to Austria or Hungary, see Vienna to Ljubljana and Budapest to Ljubljana.

If you would rather have a local show you round, book a guided tour in Maribor and choose by the reviews.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Maribor before prices climb.