Achilles Thommen

Achilles Thommen. Print from the Swiss Portrait Gallery series , 1894

Achilles Thommen (born May 25, 1832 in Basel , † August 21, 1893 in Maria Schutz , Lower Austria) was a Swiss engineer who was involved in the construction of numerous railway lines in Austria-Hungary and Switzerland .

life and work

Achilles Thommen was born in 1832 as the youngest son of master cooper Johann Jakob Thommen and Ursula, née. Marbach, born in Basel. After completing the Pedagogy in Basel , he first studied three semesters of history, art history and mathematics at the University of Basel and from 1850 to 1852 mechanical engineering at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic .

He then got his first job at the Schweizerische Centralbahn  under Karl Etzel  and was involved in the construction of the line from Olten  to Bern  and Lucerne  . When Etzel was appointed director of the Kaiser Franz Joseph-Orientbahn in 1857 , Thommen followed him to Pettau . Afterwards he was responsible for the routing and construction of the Brenner Railway under Etzel as site manager , where helical tunnels were built for the first time as a technical innovation . After Etzel's death in 1865, he and Wilhelm Pressel managed the completion of the railway. At that time he was already planning a train over the Arlberg .

After the completion of the Brenner Railway, he became construction director of the Hungarian State Railways in Budapest in 1868 , where he was responsible for the construction of a railway network of over 2,400 km in length. After two years, however, he resigned from this position for health reasons and moved to Vienna , where he devoted himself to private work and worked as a consultant, expert and broker, among others for the Gotthard Railway , the Arlberg Railway and the Simplon Railway or in the renovation of the railway stations in Basel , Bern , Lucerne and Zug . He belonged to the governing bodies of several railway companies and businesses, including the Austrian Northwest Railway , the South-North German Verbindungsbahn , the Wienerberger Ziegelfabriks- and construction company , the kk Danube Steam Navigation Company , the soil Credit institute and the Viennese locomotive factories in Actien -Society . He became a royal councilor in 1869 and k. k. Senior building officer appointed.

Achilles Thommen had been married to the Austrian Emma Bratanitsch since 1859. The couple had a daughter and two sons, including Rudolf Thommen , who became a professor of history at the University of Basel.

After a long illness, Thommen died in Maria Schutz am Semmering in 1893 , where he had retired to relax. He was buried in Pettau.

Honors

Achilles Thommen was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Franz Joseph Order in 1867 for his services to the construction of the Brenner Railway . The Ing.-Thommen-Straße in Innsbruck is named after him.

literature

• Peter Müller-Grieshaber: Thommen, Achilles. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• E. Offenthaler:  Thommen, Achilles. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 14, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2012–, ISBN 978-3-7001-7312-0 , p. 306 f. (Direct links on p. 306 , p. 307 ).
• Thommen, Achilles . In: Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, Volume 19, Leipzig 1909, pp. 496–497 ( online )
• † Senior building officer Achilles Thommen. In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung, Volume 21/22 (1893), Issue 9, pp. 60–62 ( digitized version )

Web links

• Achilles Thommen estate in the Basel University Library