Vacha train station
| Vacha (Rhön) | |
|---|---|
 Vacha train station, reception building, street side
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| Data | |
| Location in the network | former separation station |
| opening | 1879 (narrow gauge) 1906 (standard gauge) |
| Conveyance | Passenger traffic 2001 |
| location | |
| City / municipality | Vacha |
| Place / district | Vacha |
| country | Thuringia |
| Country | Germany |
| Coordinates | 50 ° 49 '36 " N , 10 ° 1' 36" E |
| Railway lines | |
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| Railway stations in Thuringia | |
The Vacha station is located in Vacha on the Bad Salzungen – Unterbreizbach railway in the Wartburg district in Thuringia and was a separation station for the Werra Valley Railway and the Ulster Valley Railway until the early 1950s .
history
On June 1, 1879, the railway line from Salzungen via Dorndorf to Lengsfeld was opened as the first meter-gauge line for public transport in Germany. In the same year, a branch to Vacha was opened for traffic from Dorndorf station .
When extensive potash deposits were developed in the Werra and Feldatal valleys towards the end of the 19th century , the narrow-gauge railway gained great importance in the construction of the pits and the removal of the extracted products, and Vacha developed into a transport hub in the Werra potash district . The regular-gauge Werra Valley Railway from Gerstungen to Dankmarshausen , which opened in 1903, was extended to Vacha via Heringen by October 1905 . The narrow-gauge railway between Vacha and Salzungen was converted to standard gauge as an extension of this route in 1906 . On August 1, 1906, the Ulstertal Railway to Geisa went into operation. Basalt loading was set up at the station for the basalt mining on the nearby Öchsenberg and the Vacha depot .
During the Second World War, the station and its tracks remained largely undamaged. Nevertheless, the war had far-reaching effects on rail operations around Vacha: The routes in a westerly direction to Gerstungen and Geisa and thus also to the potash shafts in Unterbreizbach ran in sections through Hessian territory and thus from 1945 in the US occupation zone . The maintenance of operations was characterized by difficult negotiations between the occupying powers. Since the Americans, for their part, needed the route via Gerstungen for the removal of potash from the shafts near Heimboldshausen , a corridor solution was negotiated for traffic from and in the direction of Unterbreizbach / Geisa, which lasted until the beginning of July 1952. However, when the GDR stopped transit traffic from Heimboldshausen via Gerstungen in the direction of Bebra , the railway connections between Vacha and Philippsthal were finally interrupted. In order to keep the Unterbreizbach potash plant still connected to the GDR rail network, the regime built a bypass route via Sünna with great logistical and propaganda effort until November 1952 . The depot of Kraftverkehr Bad Salzungen on the southern outskirts of Vacha was built in 1957-61 to handle passenger traffic to and from Unterbreizbach and Geisa with omnibuses . This made the Vacha station a through station on the Bad Salzungen – Unterbreizbach railway line; the Ulstertalbahn was shut down and the remaining rail connection to Philippsthal on the Werra Valley Railway, on which there had been no passenger traffic between Philippsthal and Vacha since 1945, was interrupted after cross-border freight traffic was discontinued on September 29, 1962 at the state border and later dismantled on the Hessian side .
The turning point and peaceful revolution in the GDR brought a decline in the volume of traffic on the spacious Vacha train station. The basalt mining at Oechsenberg was stopped in 1990, the basalt loading at Vacha station closed and dismantled. With the cessation of potash traffic on the route to Unterbreizbach after the commissioning of a new connecting curve from Unterbreizbach to Philippsthal, passenger traffic from Bad Salzungen to Vacha also ended in 2001 and with it all traffic at Vacha station. The interest group traffic history in the middle Werratal e. V. took care of the maintenance of the railway facilities in Vacha and on the route towards Bad Salzungen on a voluntary basis from 2001 onwards.
Reactivation plans
Since 2011 there has been restricted freight traffic on the route from Bad Salzungen to Vacha. Kali und Salz has announced that it intends to put the Unterbreizbach – Vacha connection back into operation. The plans of the potash concern fed the hope of resumption of passenger traffic between Gerstungen and Vacha. The working group of the responsible authorities and the state of Hesse on the potential for passenger traffic of disused railway lines also sees the possibility of reactivation between Gerstungen and Vacha.
Web links
- Pictures from the train station on forgotten Bahnen.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Knauf, Markus Schmidt: The history of the Ulstertalbahn 1981-1996 Verlag Rockstuhl, Bad Langensalza 2018, ISBN 978-395-966-295-6 , page 100ff.
- ↑ Michael Knauf / Eugen Rohm: The history of VEB Kraftverkehr Bad Salzungen - Headquarters Vacha - 1952–1990 , Verlag Rockstuhl, Bad Langensalza 2009, ISBN 978-3-86777-113-9 , page 4ff.
- ↑ Südthüringer Zeitung of April 20, 2011, page 15
- ↑ K + S wants to reactivate the railway line from Unterbreizbach to Vacha , Hersfelder Zeitung, December 20, 2019
- ↑ Are regional trains going through the Werra Valley again soon? , osthessen-news, accessed on August 2, 2020
- ↑ Inventory of the railway lines , State of Hesse, accessed on August 2, 2020
- ↑ Hersfelder Zeitung: Closing the gap is getting closer from August 8, 2020
literature
- Michael Knauf, Markus Schmidt: The history of the Ulstertalbahn 1981–1996; Verlag Rockstuhl, Bad Langensalza 2018, ISBN 978-395-966-295-6
- Michael Knauf: History of the railway line Vacha - Unterbreizbach 1952–2000. First socialist railway construction in Germany, September 1 - November 30, 1952. Rockstuhl, Bad Langensalza 2008, ISBN 978-3-86777-038-5 .
- Günter Fromm, Harald Rockstuhl: The history of the Feldabahn 1880–1997 - The history of the old Feldabahn 1880–1934. The history of the new Feldabahn 1934–1997. The last years of the Feldabahn 1997-2004. Rockstuhl Verlag, Bad Langensalza 2004, ISBN 3-929000-85-7 .
- Ulf Haußen, Waldemar Haußen: The Feldabahn - the first meter-gauge railway in Germany . Bufe-Fachverlag, Egglham 1993, ISBN 3-922138-49-7 .