Austria plans border checks as thousands refugees backlogged

Migrants board a train at a station near the border with Austria in Freilassing, Germany September 15, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

The exact nature of the controls was not specified, but Austria's defence minister has said people arriving at the border will not be sent back to Hungary.

In Salzburg, crowds of migrants waited patiently in the station for trains to take them across the border.

"The biggest problem is the station. We need to keep it running," Wilfried Haslauer, the governor of Salzburg province, told Reuters. Around 80 percent of the scheduled trains towards Munich, the main route into Germany, were cancelled on Tuesday because of the border controls, according to OeBB staff in Salzburg.

There were around 10,000 migrants in Vienna, police there said.

NEW ROUTES

The rush into Austria eased on Tuesday after Hungary shut its border with Serbia, giving Austria more time to arrange the transfer of people to Germany.

Police in the eastern province of Burgenland said around 6,000 migrants had entered Austria from Hungary on Tuesday.

Hungary has over the last couple of weeks transported tens of thousands of migrants to near its border with Austria and left them to walk across into the Austrian town of Nickelsdorf.

"We think that many thousand people were still on the go in Hungary before the border closed and they will surely make their way to Nickelsdorf here in Austria and try to continue their journey to Germany," a police spokesman said on Tuesday morning.

Austria was also bracing itself for a shift in migrants' routes after Hungary's closure of the Serbian border.

"Today will be a decisive day for us," the director general for public security, Konrad Kogler, told ORF radio. "We expect that if (Hungary's) measures are very effective we will have to deal with different, new routes."

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