WESTbahn

On 11 December 2011, Westbahn formally commenced operations on the Vienna–Salzburg route, becoming the first open-access operator to enter Austria's domestic long-distance railway market. It is operated in direct competition with the government-owned ÖBB, which promptly started offering heavily-discount fares on the same route. In response, Westbahn also introduced its own discounts on weekend fares; while a healthy level of ridership was reported by July 2012, revenue levels were stated to be below the levels that had been anticipated.

Westbahn initially operated a single service between Vienna and Salzburg over a distance of 308 kilometres (191 mi). Typically running in one-hour intervals, this service called at Wien Westbahnhof, Wien Hütteldorf, St. Pölten Hbf, Amstetten, Linz Hbf, Wels Hbf, Attnang-Puchheim and Salzburg Hbf. From its start of operation until September 2013, the service had also continued to Salzburg Taxham Europark and Freilassing due to the rebuilding of Salzburg Hbf.

During the 2010s, Westbahn often spoke out on legislative bias towards state-owned operators and the need for reform to favour the travelling public and competitive forces. In November 2012, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) found that the Austrian infrastructure manager ÖBB Infrastructure had acted unlawfully in preventing Westbahn's access of real-time data on train movements of other operators, hindering its operations. During November 2019, Austria's Federal Administrative Court ruled in favour of a complaint made by Westbahn as to how track access charges were being calculated and approved by the Austrian rail regular Schienen-Control; as a consequence, the charges for track access between 2011 and 2017 were recalculated to lower values. That same year, the ECJ also ruled in favour of Westbahn against the inclusion of station access charges in the area access packages that the company was purchasing.

In August 2019, it was announced that Westbahn would take on the open-access operations on the Vienna - Brno - Prague route from incumbent operator RegioJet on 15 December of that year.