The entire route in Austria is owned and is operated up to Lindau-Insel by the Austrian Federal Railways (Österreichische Bundesbahnen, ÖBB).

No mountain railway, which would be needed to cross the Arlberg, had yet been built in Austria and a line with no connection to the Tyrolean areas seemed useless.

Moreover, Vorarlberg was not an independent crown land of Austria-Hungary, and thus possessed no representatives in the Imperial Council (Reichsrat) in Vienna.

In 1856, the president of the newly formed association now called the Vorarlberg Chamber of Trade and Commerce, Carl Ganahl signed a petition for approval of the preliminary work.

In the same year he made a formal application for a license for the project to the Imperial and Royal (kaiserlich und königlich) Ministry of Commerce.

The main route of the line, with the exception of the Bregenz–Lochau section, is duplicated and fully electrified, while the section from the state border to Lindau-Insel station represents a special case in that the overhead electrical line was built by the ÖBB workshop in Bludenz to German regulations.

For this reason (and because Lindau-Insel station (formerly called Lindau Hauptbahnhof) is a terminal station) almost all international trains had to switch from the electrical locomotives of Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) or ÖBB to the diesel locomotives of Deutsche Bahn (or vice versa) in Lindau.

The lines to Munich and to Friedrichshafen (Bodensee-Gürtelbahn and Wuerttemberg Southline) are now electrified and all trains now run via a rebuilt station at Lindau-Reutin, which does not require reversal.

At the northern end of Feldkirch station a single-track, electrified, 18.5 km line branches to Buchs from Bregenz.