Under the Tuscan Sun

I just watched Under the Tuscan Sun, the Diane Lane movie based on the book of the same name by Frances Mayes. Yes, it's sentimental, but adequately so for a guy who's buying an old house in the countryside (me). I'm left with the lines, spoken by the character Martini:

"Signora, between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come."