Spandau military railway
The military railway Spandau combined defense and industrial companies in the Berlin district of Spandau associated local situation Haselhorst with the Berlin-Hamburg railway . It should not be confused with the first Spandau War Railway , which existed on the opposite bank of the Havel for around 20 years from 1887 .
prehistory
Gunpowder was already being produced in Spandau in the 16th century, and in 1722 Friedrich Wilhelm I opened a rifle factory there. In 1826 the military treasury acquired the Eiswerder island in the Havel and built a powder magazine there . In 1830 Eiswerder received a port. A year later, the fireworks laboratory was completed, where primarily ignition mirrors, flares and electric mine and gun ignitions were made and grenades were filled.
Additional military factories were subsequently added on both sides of the Spree . Between 1838 and 1890, among other things, a gun foundry, an ammunition factory and a gas station to supply them were built. A chemical plant for the production of the acids required for the manufacture of ammunition was built on the site of the Salzhof .
Since 1846 Spandau had a station on the Berlin-Hamburg Railway, since 1871 also on the Berlin-Lehrter Railway . Most of the military-fiscal companies did not have their own rail connection, and goods were transported with carts .
The military railroad
In 1889, the construction of a railway line connecting all the “royal factories” from the Hamburger Bahnhof (currently: Bahnhof Berlin-Stresow ) to Eiswerder Island and the Salzhof was approved. Construction began in spring 1890, and the line was put into operation at the beginning of February 1892.
Starting from the Hamburger Bahnhof , the route ran north, crossed the artillery workshop and served the gun foundry. Then she crossed the Spree on a 55 meter long bridge. On the right bank of the Spree she touched the bullet factory , followed the Zitadellenweg and reached the ammunition and cartridge factory as well as the powder factory. To the north of today's Haselhorst sports stadium, a siding branched off from the main branch leading to Eiswerder to the chemical factory at Salzhof. The 31-meter-long Small Eiswerder Bridge crossed the eastern arm of the Havel to the island of Eiswerder .
There was a small transfer station at the powder factory . The length of the main tracks was 6,459 meters, the side tracks were 6,181 meters long. Operational management and maintenance of the line were the responsibility of the state railway, the costs were borne by the military.
The company Siemens took its own 1,908 freight railway in operation, at the western end of the nuns dam (now Nonnendammallee ) branched off from the track of the military train. The subsequent transfer station of the Siemens freight railway is still between the lanes of the multi-lane road. In addition, the Siemens locomotives also had permission to drive to the transfer station in front of the powder factory. A key point of the agreement was the priority of military traffic, which in 1915 aroused Siemens' desire for its own connection to the state railway. However, the strategic importance of traffic to and from the Siemens works increasingly prevented the military tax authorities from exercising their prerogative after 1913.
In the years 1909/1910 the tracks of the Hamburg and Lehrter Bahn were raised. The military railway had to give up its previous connection and received a new connection from the Ruhleben station . The track leaves the freight yard in a westerly direction and follows the embankment to the industrial area , where it passes under it and immediately afterwards crosses Freiheit . After a left turn, the old track to the Spreebrücke was reached again on the site of the artillery workshop.
The new connection was put into operation in 1910. During the First World War , the capacity limit of the largely single-track line was quickly reached due to increased armaments production. First a branch track to the Spandauer Südhafen was built, in 1915 another to the Spree. There the freight wagons were transported across the river by means of a trajectory and put back on the tracks on the north bank.
In 1917 and 1918, 120,000 cars were transported on the tracks north of the Spree. Siemens' intention to build its own connection line to the east head of the Ruhleben station was initially not pursued any further after 1918, as the volume of transport dropped sharply after the end of the war.
1918-1945
The Versailles Treaty led to the dismantling of the military installations under the supervision of a control commission of the Entente . The Reichswerke (later: Deutsche Industriewerke , DIWAG) took over the buildings and track systems for commercial use. Industrial companies settled on the area of the former armaments factories, for example the mineral oil company Rhenania-Ossag at Salzhof in 1928 . In 1929 the consumer cooperative followed , which received a 370-meter-long siding along the Telegrafenweg . Five years later, Westfälische Transport Aktiengesellschaft (WTAG) rented two buildings on Eiswerder for the storage and transshipment of grain .
Industrieanlagen GmbH (Inag) was founded in 1926 and took over the facilities north of the Spree. Management remained with DIWAG, which acquired five T 3 series locomotives and one T 7 from the Deutsche Reichsbahn .
The volume of transport on the former military tracks remained far below the pre-war level. In 1928 it again reached 49,000 wagons per year, of which, however, around 85 percent were deliveries to Siemens. The handover of the Reichsbahn now all led to the Siemens train station on Nonnendammallee, which was expanded from three to five tracks in 1928. The following year, a restricted level crossing was set up on Berliner Chaussee (today: Am Juliusturm ) .
In 1931/1932, Siemens and Bewag received the connection to the east end of the Ruhleben train station, which was planned in 1915 (shared track to the Ruhleben power station ). When it went into operation, the Siemens freight railway was cut off, for which it was sufficient to pour tar over the connecting tracks. The straightening of the Spree from 1938 seemed to necessitate the construction of a new bridge over the old arm, the new piercing and the Berliner Chaussee , but the construction work was stopped soon after the beginning of the Second World War . In the last days of the war, the retreating German troops blew up both bridges over the Spree.
post war period
As early as 1940, the connection to the Siemens freight railway was made passable again in order to be able to maintain traffic over the second bridge after the possible destruction of one bridge by bombs. However, the track connection was not used operationally during the war years. The connection between the two railways was not put back into operation until October 1945, as both the Inag line and the Siemens freight railway no longer had a connection to the Reichsbahn network due to the destroyed Spree bridges. An emergency connection to the S-Bahn tracks at Gartenfeld station initially enabled the freight cars and locomotives to be transferred. It lasted until March 1950. From 1946 to 1948, the Siemens freight railway's Spree Bridge was lifted and repaired. The Inag bridge was not rebuilt, the Inag became the next connection to the Siemens freight railway at the transfer station Nonnendammallee. The bridge to the Eiswerder island was preserved and was also opened to motor vehicle traffic after the war.
The company was managed in the first post-war years by the Siemens freight railway, for which it used its own accumulator locomotives and at times hired third-party vehicles. In 1946 and 1947 a two-axle Rhenania-Ossag diesel locomotive , built by Orenstein & Koppel (O&K), was used on the Inag tracks , and a repaired diesel locomotive from Deutz operated in 1949 and 1950 . Plans by the Siemens freight railway to acquire its own diesel locomotive for operation on the former military tracks or to electrify them ended in 1951 when the management of the Inag tracks was handed over to WTAG.
The WTAG time
After the Second World War, the transport volume on the former military railway was initially low. Most of the connections were bombed out or dismantled, one of the few remaining was the WTAG itself. Locomotives number 1, a Köf II from O&K, and 2, a DG 39 from Henschel were sufficient for operation. At the beginning of the 1960s, an MV 6b from O&K was added with the road number 3, locomotive number 1 was replaced by a two-way vehicle. In the mid-1950s, the Nonnendammallee transfer station was reduced to three tracks.
With the expansion of Shell's facilities and the construction of a tank farm by Esso am Salzhof, the volume of transport increased considerably in 1966. WTAG acquired a more powerful locomotive for heavy trains with oil products with a Henschel DHG 240 (240 HP = 177 kW ), which was given the number 2 (II). At the beginning of the 1970s, a 665 PS (489 kW) MC 700 N with company number 1 (II) was added, followed by a MaK 1000 D with 1000 PS (735 kW, company number 2 (III)) in 1978 .
The trains taken over at Nonnendammallee station were first pulled into Zitadellenweg by the end of the 1970s and then pushed towards Eiswerder or Salzhof. In 1979 a connecting curve was created from Nonnendammallee to Daumstraße and the trains were pushed directly there. A three-track system on Daumstrasse made it possible to split long trains and move the locomotive.
The last few years: Rhenus
The abandonment of several siding, especially that of the cardboard factory on Telegrafenweg, reduced the track network to around 13 kilometers. The track from Nonnendammallee to Salzhof, on the other hand, was renewed in the early 1980s. The most important connections at the time were the two tank farms on the island of Eiswerder, as well as Rhenus AG, in which WTAG was finally merged in 1984. A locomotive shed was built there for the two locomotives .
By the end of the 1960s, traffic to the tank farms had already outstripped Siemens freight traffic. In 1988, Rhenus took over management of the Siemens freight railway tracks.
The Esso and Shell tank farms were demolished by 1996, and from 1997 the Wasserstadt Oberhavel residential area was built on the Salzhof site . The tracks on the other side of Nonnendammallee have now almost completely disappeared.
Others
On the occasion of the 750th birthday of the city of Spandau, special trips with a passenger train of the Berliner Eisenbahnfreunde took place on four Sundays in September 1982 . Around 7000 passengers took advantage of the previously unique opportunity to ride on the tracks between Gartenfeld and Eiswerder.
literature
- Bodo Schulz / Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) . 1st edition. C. Kersting, Niederkassel-Mondorf 1989, ISBN 3-925250-06-9 .
- Arne Hengsbach: The military railways in Spandau . In: Berliner Verkehrsblätter , 1974, pp. 20-23, 78-83, 1975, pp. 7-10, 26-29.
Web links
- Passenger train of the Berliner Eisenbahnfreunde on Eiswerder , accessed on October 14, 2013
- The course of the route in a survey map of Spandau from 1939 in the holdings of the Architecture Museum in the University Library of the Technical University of Berlin, accessed on January 22, 2014.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 102
- ↑ Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 112
- ↑ Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 114
- ↑ Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 105
- ↑ Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 117
- ↑ a b c Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 119
- ↑ Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 108
- ^ Also tanks from Shell in Haselhorst released for demolition. In: Berliner Zeitung , January 5, 1996, accessed October 14, 2013
- ↑ Bodo Schulz, Michael Krolop: The private and industrial railways in Berlin (West) , p. 109