Service of the International Rhine Regulation

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Service of the International Rhine Regulation
Locomotive number 5 Höchst of the service railway, around 1900
Locomotive number 5 Höchst of the service railway , around 1900
Route length: 25 km
Gauge : 750 mm ( narrow gauge )
Power system : 750 V  =
Legend
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Mouth of the Rhine into Lake Constance
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Lustenau factory yard
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St. Margrethen – Lauterach railway line
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Lustenau Wiesenrain
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Unterlien quarry
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Widnau Habsburg
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Heerbrugg – Diepoldsau tram (until 1956)
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Kriessern
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Kadelberg quarry Koblach
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Piston stone quarry Montlingen
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The former service railway of the International Rhine Regulation is a partially electrified narrow-gauge railway in Austria and Switzerland . It was built for the International Rhine Regulation (IRR) and has been operated by the Rhein-Schauen association since 2008 . Today it is only operated as a museum railway.

history

The State Treaty of 1892 between Switzerland and Austria on the regulation of the Alpine Rhine resulted in the establishment of a service line for the International Rhine Regulation Commission (IRRK) in 1895 . The track width chosen was 750 millimeters in order to make the railway compatible with a runway operated by the St. Gallen Rhine correction . The route of the railway has changed in the course of the ongoing regulation of the Rhine, old parts of the route were partially dismantled and the track material was used to develop new sections of the route. Finally, the route ran for around 33 kilometers from the site of the Kadelberg quarry in Koblach (Austria), where the material for the construction and repair of the Rhine dam was extracted, on the left bank of the Rhine via Widnau (Switzerland) and on the right bank of the Rhine via Lustenau (Austria), where the workshop of the Rhine construction management is located.

The first electric locomotive entered service in 1946. By 1950 almost the entire network was electrified. The service railway handled a daily output of 400 tons of quarry material. A total of two million tons of rock were removed from the quarries of the International Rhine Regulation and transported away by rail.

On January 1, 2008, the Rhein-Schauen association , which had previously offered trips on a museum railway on the route, took over the entire operation of the railway.

At the beginning of 2012, parts of the Rhine bridge, which went into operation in 1948, near the Kriessern customs office (near Mäder) were dismantled. Since then, the section between the Rhine bridge and the Kadelberg quarry (Koblach) has been cut off from the rest of the service railway network. A discussed reconstruction was rejected in favor of the largest possible cross-section of the river bed. In March 2020, a Swiss company lifted the two 70 t steel lattice girders spanning the river from the pillars using a Liebherr LR 11000 crawler crane installed on the Swiss side , which were then also dismantled.

  • Route on the right bank of the Rhine near Hard, Schuurutsche, view to the north

  • Level crossing at Hard shortly before the end of the line, view to the north

  • Two old freight wagons near Koblach : flat wagons, one-sided bulk wagon

  • The stretch between Kriessern and Mäder (October 2011) - the bridge section on the Swiss side has meanwhile been dismantled, the trusses in the background were lifted from the pillars in March 2020.

  • Rhine bridge between Lustenau (Austria) and Widnau (Switzerland)

Museum operation

Widnau steam locomotive , stationed in Lustenau, filling it with water

The museum railway of the Rheinschauen Association ( Rheinschauen Museum in Lustenau) is operated with steam and electric locomotives from the IRR and former Steyrtalbahn passenger cars, as well as self-made freight car chassis from narrow-gauge railways of the Austrian Federal Railways . The trips all start at the museum in Lustenau and lead on the right bank of the Rhine to the mouth of the Rhine or on the left bank of the Rhine to Widnau or to Kriessern on request. Furthermore, special and adventure trips are offered combined with the Lake Constance boat trip.

vehicles

The fleet now includes five diesel locomotives (20 to 100 hp ), three electric diesel locomotives (two of them with 90 hp, one with 53 hp) and two steam locomotives for museum operations, the Liesl with 90 hp and built by Maffei in 1921 the 80 hp Widnau, formerly St. Gallen , built in 1910, from the Arnold Jung Lokomotivfabrik . The first steam locomotives put into service in 1896 and 1897 were Krauss locomotives . The first gasoline locomotive was made by Deutz in 1911 .

  • HEIDI electric diesel locomotive, built in 1946 by Stadler / BBC, 90 hp, 13 t
  • Electric diesel locomotive ELFI, built by Ebus / IRR in 1958, 53 HP, 10 t
  • Diesel locomotive JUNO, built in 1950, 42 HP, 7 tons
  • Diesel locomotive MIKI, built in 1951, 42 hp, 7 tons
  • On the basis of a steam locomotive, the RHEIN diesel locomotive was built at IRR in 1950: 45 hp, 4 t
  • The WALD diesel locomotive, built by Orenstein & Koppel in 1939 : 20 hp, 4 t is in the small museum of the Lustenau works yard
  • The diesel locomotive 2610 ( Demag type ML100) was delivered to Vorarlberger Illwerke in 1940 and came to IRR in 1997

  • MIKI diesel locomotive

  • JUNO diesel locomotive

  • HEIDI electric diesel locomotive

  • Electric diesel locomotive ELFI

  • IRR vehicles in the Lustenau depot with locomotives 2610 (left) and RHEIN

Passenger car acquired from the Trogenerbahn in orange VST uniform paint , formerly TL

Passenger cars 11–13 were taken over from the Trogenerbahn . The vehicles built in 1954/55 originally come from the Transports publics de la région lausannoise (TL), they are 13.54 m long and have 32 seats. In 2014, two of them were in use as B1 and B2 after gauging, the third was under renovation.

Incidents and Accidents

During a test drive of a passenger train without passengers on May 19, 2018, a train set and two wagons derailed in the section between the former Rhine bridge and the Kadelberg quarry. According to the police, unknown perpetrators are likely to have removed a point clamp from the track system at Mäder in the course of the week before.

literature

  • Anton Heer: The Railway. In: Internationale Rheinregulierung (Ed.): The Alpine Rhine and its regulation. International Rhine Regulation 1892–1992. 2nd edition, BuchsDruck, Rorschach 1993, ISBN 3-905222-65-5 , pp. 247-256.
  • Anton Heer, Ernst B. Leutwiler: The service of the "International Rhine Regulation". 3rd edition, Leutwiler, Zurich, ISBN 3-906681-10-6 .

Web links

Commons : Service of the International Rhine Regulation  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.vol.at/vorarlberg-kompletter-abbruch-der-rhein-bruecke-kriessern-maeder/6553994
  2. ↑ https://www.lustenau.at/de/rheinschauen
  3. ↑ a b c Service of the "International Rhine Regulation" , accessed on December 22, 2019
  4. ↑ Vandals derail “Rheinbähnle” orf.at, May 20, 2018, accessed May 20, 2018.

Coordinates: 47 ° 26 '52 "  N , 9 ° 39' 41"  E