Austria and Hungary
My first day trip while studying abroad in Vienna was to a town called Eisenstadt. Along the way the train there made a stop at a down called Bruck an der Leitha (literally Bridge on the Leitha River).
As with the Susquehanna I’ve viewed this river in several distinct locations. I’ve seen it as far south as in Payerbach and Breitenstein, Austria where its main headwater runs under the name of Schwarza (black) through the center of Payerbach and streams feeding the Schwarza run 1000 feet higher through the town of Breitenstein, which I managed to walk to from Payerbach. My memories of the Schwarza in these towns are very dark colored; it started to rain by the time I reached Breitenstein, and I can remember the Schwarza seeming to rise towards the tracks as I took the return train back past Payerbach.
I’ve also crossed the Leitha by train at three different points on the border between the Austrian states of Lower Austria and the Burgenland, which it and its secondary branches mark or closely parallel on its northern section. Besides the aforementioned crossing at Bruck, there are two rail lines at Wiener Neustadt and Ebenfurth on the Lower Austrian side that cross the Leitha in the direction of Sopron, Hungary.
Finally I’ve run into the Leitha or Lajta in Hungarian at Mosonmagyaróvár, a frontier town with a difficult to pronounce name (I prefer its German name of Wieselburg if only because I can easily pronounce it properly) only 10 minutes’ drive or train ride into Hungary from Austria. Here the Lajta flows into the southern branch of the Danube beside Hungary’s largest island. Walking across a bridge in a forested area of town, about a mile from its meeting point with the Danube, I saw for one last time, the other end of this river flowing over a 100 miles from the Rax range in the Alps, past the villages and towns south of Vienna, into Hungary and the Danube and eventually the Black Sea. A complete creation of its waters.