Rothwaldbahn
| Rothwaldbahn | |
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| Route length: | 7.4 km |
| Gauge : | 1000 mm ( meter gauge ) |
| Maximum slope : | 43 ‰ |
The Rothwaldbahn was a 7.4 km long meter gauge - forest railway with metal-clad wooden rails in the Lower Austrian Limestone Alps , southeast of the Dürrenstein massif . It was relocated from 1854 to 1856 in eastern Rothwald under the then landowner Festetics (Domain Gaming ) and operated as a horse-drawn tram until 1868 .
history
The Rothwaldbahn had the task of guiding the wood felled in more distant parts of the Rothwald that drained to the Salza in Styria to the raft lake, the Oisklause (formerly Grazer Klause ), located on the Weißen Ois , the upper reaches of the Ybbs . At first, when the wood was still being felled in the vicinity of the hermitage, ordinary means of transport were sufficient to make it to the hermitage at moderate cost. As soon as the blows but increasingly distant from the cell against the transport direction and thus through the costly Brin narrowing the profitability was made of red wood into question the further utilization, new funds were required to allow the transport to the cell in a more effective manner.
Route
The length of the railway from the Oisklause to the rear part of the Rothwald was 7,390 meters. The exclusively uphill stretch ran from the Oisklause to the southwest through the trough and over the Bärenrisssattel ( watershed between Ybbs and Salza ) northwest, over the Goldbach and along the Jagdhausstraße, finally eastwards past the small jungle over two inlets of the Moderbach , where a forest road is today still called Alte Bahn .
Superstructure
The track's superstructure consisted of wooden sleepers and wooden long sleepers fitted with metal rails. The track width was 1000 mm. The flat bars, 40 millimeters wide and 12 millimeters high, were 1 to 3.7 meters long and weighed around 4 kilograms per meter and cost 500 marks per ton from the A. Töpper factory in Scheibbs from 1854 to 1856 ( 25 marks per hundredweight ).
Each of these rails was attached to the long sleepers by 4 nails with heads sunk into the flat rails. The nails cost 42 pfennigs the hundred, with a weight of 2 ½ kilograms.
The long sleepers were square beams of 140 × 140 mm and an average length of 5.25 meters. These long sleepers rested on cross sleepers into which they were pushed. The exact setting of the track width was achieved using wooden wedges. The cross sleepers were embedded in a gravel bed.
The maximum of the slope was 42 ‰, but this slope was only driven up by empty wagons, over a length of 1517 meters. The remaining part of the track, over which the loaded wagons had to roll down, had a gradient of 4.3 ‰. The construction became very expensive due to the difficulties of the terrain, which required significant embankments and punctures.
dare
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The railroad cars were only built for slightly curved arches. The lubricator of the axle bearing was closed with a hinged cover. The bearing shell was made of white metal on some cars , and of cast iron on others. The whole facility was kept simple.
The weight of an empty car was 350-400 kg (7-8 quintals ). The wagons were connected to one another with chains and rings. The rings also took up the pull chain for the horse to be harnessed.
The braking device had two fixed points and was operated very easily with a crank, whereby the head of a vertical screw pressed an S-shaped lever downwards in its upper part. The connection between the lever and the head of the screw was such that the head of the screw could not be removed, only moved sideways.
In wet weather, in snow and in black ice, the brakes weren't enough, and the conductor helped himself by shoving a beating between the wheel spokes of the rear car and the frame, which, however, caused the cars to suffer a lot.
A locking lever, which was hung on a hook while driving, locked the car on an incline. It could be lowered on the sloping side of the car. When it moved downwards, the rod buried itself in the ground, holding the cart. This device was called "Haber".
business
The railroad made it possible to transport wood from the wooded area in which it was growing to a point from which it could be carried on by a drift .
The wood brought to the railroad with the usual means of transport was loaded onto the waiting wagons, two of which were coupled together and pulled by a horse. Several trains (each with two cars) left the loading area at once. One man was sufficient for each train crew. At the end of the track, the wood was unloaded at the unloading point and thrown over the chutes directly into the river bed above the hermitage. After unloading, 4 wagons were coupled together and transported to the other end of the track. The load for two horse-drawn wagons was 18 ¼ cubic meters (3 cubic fathoms) of forest-dry wood, predominantly fir and spruce, more rarely beech wood.
The wagon load of about 7.5 t (150 quintals) could be handled by a horse without too much effort, as the track had a fairly even gradient. 20 pfennigs were paid for each fathom to be loaded, and unloading was taken care of by the escort staff free of charge. The entire railway line could be covered three times in one working day, so that the amount of wood transported by a horse was 50 to 60 cubic meters (7½ to 9 cubic fathoms) per day.
The drying and transport of the firewood from Rothwald to Vienna took about 2 years. The following transport chain was run through:
- Rothwaldbahn from the northeastern edge of the Great Primeval Forest to the Oisklause
- Drift on the Ois from the Oisklause to Langau
- Waldbahn Langau – Lackenhof (4.7 km)
- In summer with horse-drawn carts and in winter with horse-drawn sleighs as well as on steep sections over wooden giants to a hermitage in Nestelberggraben and from there into the Erlauf near the Tormäuern
- Meets on the Erlauf to the Danube near Pöchlarn
- Wood planks on the Danube from Pöchlarn to Vienna
A little above the Oisklause , at the junction to Amaißhöhe, a marterl , which shows a horse-drawn train with loaded wagons, reminds of a fatal industrial accident in 1861. On the marterl there is the following inscription: “As a reminder: In the year [1861] of the same May 30th, the brakeman fell from a moving train and had a fatal accident at the age of 37. "
In 1867/1868 the Rothwaldbahn was stopped due to unprofitability.
literature
- Manfred Hohn : Forest railways in Austria . 3. Edition. Verlag Josef Otto Slezak , Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-85416-195-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Karl Lukan : Voralpenbuch. Verlag Jugend und Volk, Vienna, ISBN 3-224-17601-6 . P. 142ff.
- ↑ Franzisco-Josephinische Landesaufnahme (1869–1887) ( online on mapire.eu )
- ↑ a b Hermann Weiß, Hildegard Wiesenhofer and Franz Wiesenhofer: "The Trifts on the Great Erlauf" - The beginnings of the Erlauftrift. Pöchlarn, 2016.
- ↑ a b c d e Edmund Heusinger von Waldegg : Manual for special railway technology. 1878. Fifth volume, pp. 532-533 (see also reprint from 2020. ISBN 978-3-8460-4840-5 ).
- ^ Austrian Federal Office Card - ÖK50 .
- ↑ Mockery 2005
- ^ WF Exner : Modern transport in the service of agriculture and forestry. Weimar 1877.
Coordinates: 47 ° 47 ′ 6.5 ″ N , 15 ° 6 ′ 32.3 ″ E