Bickenbach – Seeheim railway line
| Bickenbach – Seeheim | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route number : | 3544 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Course book section (DB) : | last 315 e, 1944: 276 m | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Route length: | 4.4 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 1435 mm ( standard gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Bickenbach – Seeheim railway line was a 4.4 kilometer long, non-electrified, standard-gauge branch line on the Hessian Bergstrasse . It connected the villages of today's Seeheim-Jugenheim community with the Main-Neckar Railway and was called Ziggelsche in dialect .
prehistory
The driving force behind the construction of the railway was a railway committee chaired by Captain Carl Scriba, who was also involved in other railway projects in the region. The project was supported by Prince Alexander von Hessen and bei Rhein , President of the First Chamber of the State Parliament of the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt , among others . The grand ducal family owned Heiligenberg Castle near Jugenheim . Nevertheless, the concession for the construction of the line was not granted until July 1893. Now the community of Bickenbach and the landowners there resisted. The municipality of Bickenbach was bypassed by the railway in a wide arc and had no use from it.
construction
Because of the difficult land acquisition, construction could not begin until December 1894. The terrain presented no major difficulties. In the Bickenbach station , the railway was given its own platform and a switch connection , which enabled both the locomotive to be moved and trains from the Main-Neckar Railway from Darmstadt to be possible. The line was completed in July 1895 and opened on July 6, 1895.
business
The train traffic was very dense from the start. 18 pairs of trains ran on weekdays and 17 on Sundays, so that there was a connection to almost every train on the Main-Neckar Railway that stopped in Bickenbach. At the beginning there was also a theater train that left Darmstadt at 11:45 p.m. and reached Seeheim at 12:24 a.m. The railway was especially important for tourism to the climatic health resorts of Seeheim and Jugenheim. The were used on the route especially locomotives Prussian class T3 .
Decline
Until April 30, 1930, Seeheim station was also a locomotive station . From 1931, trips outside of the rush hour were replaced by rail replacement services , postal buses of the Reichspost . But that failed in the long run due to the resistance of the tourism industry. Even in the last Reich curriculum before the end of the Second World War of July 3, 1944, twelve pairs of trains are still listed on weekdays and ten train pairs on Sundays.
As part of the general policy of the German Federal Railroad to shut down numerous branch lines, passenger traffic on the line was stopped on December 31, 1955, without prior checking whether operations - for example with Uerdinger rail buses - could have been maintained. The route was still used by a few special trains, including the Glass Train and a special election train of the then Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1957. Freight traffic was stopped in July 1960. In March 1961 the line was finally dismantled.
After the tracks had been dismantled, the idea arose of moving the meter-gauge Darmstadt tram between Seeheim and Jugenheim , which had previously been running parallel to the railway line, onto the route of the previous branch line, which was implemented in 1966. Part of the route is still preserved today. In 1979, a section of the tram extension from Jugenheim to Alsbach was laid on the former railway line. The Bickenbacher Strasse is now crossed by the tram at the same level, not like the railway line that crossed the street with a bridge.
literature
- Hans Buchmann: The "Ziggelsche": The branch line Bickenbach-Seeheim . In: The railway and its history. = Series of publications of the district of Darmstadt-Dieburg 2 (Ed .: Georg Wittenberger / Förderkreis Museen und Denkmalpflege Darmstadt-Dieburg). Darmstadt 1985, pp. 27–35.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Official Gazette of the Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz of May 17, 1930, No. 25. Announcement No. 345, p. 155.
- ↑ German State Railroad Company (ed.): Official Journal of the Reichsbahndirektion Mainz of 3 October 1931 No. 46. Announcement No. 652, S. 307th..
Web links
- History and some pictures of the Bickenbach – Seeheim route ( Memento from October 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive )