Train Venice to Ljubjana

Bus service is probably the better way to get between Venice and Ljubljana. The Italian rail network does not connect very well with Slovenia. There are many trains a day, but they require a change of stations by taxi or bus, either at Gorizia/Nova Gorica, or Trieste/Villa Opicina.
Look at www.bahn.com to see the rail options.

When I last looked into it last spring, there was one train and it got in at like 2am. That seemed to be the case for the last few years. We went via passenger ferry to Piran then up to Ljubljana (easy but more $); bus seems to be the cheapest and more often than train.

Thanks for the info. Whodathunk the German rail site would have the best info for a trip between Italy and Slovenia. I think it will be workable, we will have to figure out how to get between stations in Trieste.

Have a look at this company - https://www.goopti.com/en they provide a bus service to Ljubjana from both Venice and Trieste.

You need to research if this is the way you want to travel, it’s not a set time they advise you about 24hrs before you travel as to the pick up time, but they are reliable.

There are quite a few reviews on TA about them.

My family and I took the train from Venezia to Trieste. That's easy. We stayed in Trieste for two nights and loved it. The bus station is literally next door to the train station. We took the bus to Istria but you could take one to Ljubjana. The buses are small (15 person) vans and are very comfortable and pleasant. It's all very easy to arrange. I suggest you buy the bus tickets a day in advance to be safe. I'll also mention that Ljubljana and Slovenia are wonderful places to visit. Bon Voyage.

Yes, DB is the best place to get train schedules for most of the European railways. At Trieste, the train connections assume a leg using the Villa Opicina Tram (this option is a pretty recent addition).

See also the DRD direct bus from Venice or Arriva bus from Trieste.

Thanks everybody for all the information!

DRD was mentioned above. Please remember that it is not a conventional "bus service." Although they have scheduled times on their website, you MUST contact them ahead of time to ensure they will actually pick you up. Don't show up at a DRD "bus stop" expecting a bus with "DRD" written on it to come by at the scheduled time and just get on. The last time I used DRD last year at Venice Marco Polo airport, no "DRD bus" showed up - instead, a guy came over and asked if we were waiting for DRD? He then guided me (and two other waiting passengers) to an unmarked van on the other side of the parking lot, and that's what we took to Ljubljana.

I had emailed DRD ahead of time (and they wrote back to me soon before the scheduled time) but the other two waiting with me had pre-purchased tickets. It would have been easy for DRD's van to be full, so if so I would have been out of luck. A friend of mine tried to take DRD from the same airport a few days earlier than I did and DRD simply never showed up - she didn't have tickets either but they never emailed her back. I assume their van was full.

I will probably use GoOpti in the future. If you use DRD, I would contact them ahead of time, and having a local phone you can use to call them near pick-up time to confirm would be of great help.

There is a kind of Iron Curtain of infrastructure separating the border of Italy from the former Yugoslavia -- I would suspect many years of political division and infrastructure disinvestment made the rails systems of Italy and Slovenia/Croatia simply non compatible.

You'd normally have to train from Venice up to the alps and through Austria (Lienz or Villach) to go down to Ljubljana. Or you could do as the above poster suggests - train to Trieste and wait for the one or two trains that connect Trieste with Ljubljana. Never done it, but I gather it is a slow and underserved "commuter line" - it does not leave from Trieste proper. From the Trieste main train station, you have to ride up to Villa Opicina using Trieste public transport to get it. Not super practical for you.

There's an old saying which applies in this case: "You can't get there from here".

It's actually even worse. Up to 2008, intercity connections used to be excellent, there was a direct ICS class train between Ljubljana and Venice and an express night train running between Venice and Budapest. Then, ironically, just as Slovenia joined Schengen and the borders opened, FS, the Italian railway operator, unilaterally cancelled all cross-border connections due to cost cutting and has blocked new connections, apart from the connection to Villa Opicina, the border station, where SZ, the Slovenian operator, has unhindered access anyway. Hopefully, with the introduction of the ERTMS unified signalling system in the next few years, SZ will be able to start running the train on its own, without FS.