Stams Bahnhof

Stams Bahnhof is a small-town train station in Austria’s Imst district, in Tyrol. The primary reasons why anybody might take a train there would be to visit Stams Abbey (a thirteenth-century Cistercian monastery), to attend Schigymnasium Stams (a state-of-the-art Olympictraining center for aspiring winter athletes), or simply to marvel at the scenic surroundings—a welcome perk for anybody traveling through the Tyrol region, surrounded by the Austrian Alps.

With less than 1,500 inhabitants in the town,the train station may not be large or bustling by any stretch, but Stams was once an important place of pilgrimage, which was why the abbey was founded there.

These days, official business within Stams is more to the tune of strongly worded warnings from the municipality about shrub pruning, as residents must trim their bushes to at least 10 centimeters from the edge of the road.

ÖBB runs the rails in Austria and is one of the most timely railway operators in Europe, with punctuality rates resting around 97 percent. So our lone rail official here is either checking out whether he’s witnessing a rare delay…or perhaps looking to hop a train out of town, due to shame about his home’s unwieldy shrubbery.

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