Blaufelden – Langenburg railway line
| Blaufelden-Langenburg | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route number (DB) : | 4954 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Course book section (DB) : | until 1963: 324g | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Route length: | 12.0 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 1435 mm ( standard gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Maximum slope : | 20 ‰ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Minimum radius : | 180 m | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top speed: | 40 km / h | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Blaufelden – Langenburg railway was a 12.0 kilometer branch line from Blaufelden to Langenburg on the eastern edge of the Hohenlohe plain in Baden-Württemberg . As a spur track them chained at the station Blaufelden from the railway Crailsheim-Königshofen from. It was opened on January 22, 1900 and closed on October 31, 1996 after passenger traffic had already ceased on May 26, 1963.
course
From Blaufelden as the starting point, the branch line ran in a tight curve away from the Crailsheim – Königshofen railway line and turned to the southwest to reach the northern outskirts of Gerabronn , touching Wittenweiler and Oberweiler . From here, the railroad oriented itself past Ludwigsruhe Castle to the west, reaching the plateau of the town of Langenburg, located above the Jagst in a loop of the river. The terminus was about 1 km from the city center.
history
Planning and opening
As early as 1858, politicians from the cities of Langenburg - at that time the royal seat of the Princely House of Hohenlohe-Langenburg - and Gerabronn - at that time the seat of an upper office - tried to get a connection to the railway network as part of the planning of the Heilbronn – Nuremberg railway line. However, the struggle for the route at that time was won over by the smaller, south-facing Oberamts-Headquarters in Crailsheim . After the two towns had to accept this fate when planning the Crailsheim – Königshofen railway in favor of the smaller community of Blaufelden, the chance to get a connection to the railway network did not arise again until the state construction of the Württemberg secondary railways from the 1890s .
These efforts resulted in a memorandum commissioned by local politicians, in which the Stuttgart technician Prof. Moritz Sapper proposed the construction of a standard-gauge, 12 km long railway line in 1892, which was to lead from Blaufelden via Gerabronn to Langenburg and which also had intermediate stations in the towns of Wittenweiler, Raboldshausen, Oberweiler with Unterweiler and Ludwigsruhe should have. The work underpinned the sense of purpose of the project with profitability calculations and declarations of intent from local businesses for the transport of goods by rail. Based on this memorandum, in the spring of 1898 the local representative in the Württemberg Chamber of Deputies succeeded in having the construction of the line as a state railway approved by law, exactly as proposed in the memorandum.
With the release of the funds on June 30, 1898, the acquisition of the required land could immediately begin; the groundbreaking ceremony took place in May 1899. Most of the civil engineering work was carried out by Silesian and Polish workers on behalf of the Berlin company Ph. Balke, the required buildings by local craft businesses. Nine months later, on Monday, January 22nd, 1900, the line could be put into operation, after four days earlier, on January 18th, the acceptance test, which was to the applause of the population, had been successfully completed.
The first years of operation
The only notable train accident on the line occurred just four weeks after the line opened, when on February 17, 1900 the locomotive of the early train from Langenburg overturned in the tight curve at the entrance to the Blaufelden station and the first two cars derailed. Excessive speed was found to be the cause. Personal injuries were not to be complained about, but considerable property damage.
The traffic on the line developed deficit in the first few years, only from 1910 onwards the Royal Württemberg State Railways recorded a positive balance. In the hope of a renewed upswing after the First World War , the Gerabronner Oberamtmann submitted a petition to the Württemberg State Ministry in September 1919 to extend the route from Blaufelden in an easterly direction to Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Bavaria : Via Wiesenbach , Brettheim , Hausen at Bach , Gammesfeld , Leuzendorf and Bettenfeld , Gebsattel should be reached on the Steinach near Rothenburg – Dombühl railway line . The city of Rothenburg was also interested in implementing the project and in March 1920 made a budget of 1 million marks available for support . However, the project never left the planning stage; the era of branch line construction was already over.
The decline
During the Second World War , the line's facilities, which as a branch line were of no strategic importance, were not damaged. Due to the severe destruction of the Crailsheim railway depot , operations on the line could not be resumed until September 1945. After that, the route experienced its last heyday, until regular passenger traffic was abandoned with the beginning of the summer timetable in 1954 in favor of a bus connection . Freight traffic continued to be lively, and until May 26, 1963, travelers were transported once a day on weekdays in each direction by means of a GmP , with passengers in Gerabronn having to wait a quarter to three quarters of an hour for shunting work.
However, the most prominent passenger did not use the railway line until after passenger traffic had ceased: On May 24, 1965, Queen Elisabeth II and her husband visited the related noble house of Langenburg with a special train . The train was pulled by a festively decorated class 50 locomotive. To ensure driving comfort, the tracks were straightened again with a track tamping machine before the journey .
In the 1970s, freight traffic also decreased to such an extent that only one service trip was required each day. In March 1984, the German Federal Railroad indicated closure plans for the first time. In response, the mayors of Blaufelden, Gerabronn and Langenburg as well as the local economy spoke out in favor of maintaining the route. The railways and neighboring communities agreed that operations on the line should be maintained until 1994, when the communities would assume the costs of maintaining the line in the amount of DM 580,000.
Despite this agreement, traffic on the Gerabronn – Langenburg section was stopped at short notice on October 18, 1991, as the poor condition of the superstructure no longer allowed safe operation. The costs for a resumption would have been 414,000 DM, the DB wanted to transfer this to the municipalities. At the end of 1995, freight traffic between Crailsheim and Schrozberg was stopped , meaning that freight wagons could no longer be used on the Blaufelden – Gerabronn route . The total closure of the line was now only a matter of form and was completed on October 31, 1996.
Previously, in the summer of the same year, Deutsche Bahn offered the route to the neighboring communities and the district of Schwäbisch Hall for takeover; the purchase price was supposed to be 600,000 Deutschmarks. However, due to the much higher estimated investments for an urgently needed rehabilitation of the route, they turned down the offer. In 2019, most of the tracks between Blaufelden and Langenburg were still overgrown and the level crossings were overgrown. The route is to however still in train fares paid .
Reactivation plans
In 2009 the city of Gerabronn took over the Gerabronner train station from private ownership. The station and route have been cleared of vegetation by volunteers since October 2009. Numerous level crossings were repaired by the neighboring communities of Gerabronn and Blaufelden. In September 2011, a development association was founded with the aim of maintaining the Gerabronn line and station. The association is to create the basis for the possible resumption of the traffic of special trips and bicycle touring trains.
business
To supply the steam locomotives, a separate locomotive shed was built at the Langenburg terminus , and there was also a water crane , the water of which was taken from the nearby Dambach source and stored in an elevated tank near the locomotive shed by means of a pulsometer pump powered by locomotive steam .
The company started operating in 1899, initially with five pairs of trains every working day, one of which ran directly to and from Crailsheim. The local railway depot provided the vehicles and staff for train operations between Blaufelden and Langenburg from the beginning until the shutdown. There were also two freight trains in each direction . Until 1928, two examples of the Württemberg type T 3 were used as locomotives, one of which was named "Langenburg" and the other was named "Hohenlohe".
Until regular passenger traffic was discontinued in 1954, there were four to five pairs of passenger trains every working day; at the end of World War II, two additional pairs drove between Gerabronn and Langenburg. From 1928 the T 3 was replaced by the 75 0 series , which now carried the bulk of the traffic until 1954. After 1954, the German Federal Railroad used class 55 steam locomotives for the remaining freight trains and freight trains with passenger transport for a short time ; after 1958, the class 94 was mainly used. From the 1960s onwards, steam locomotives of the series 50 and 64 occasionally came onto the line from the Lauda depot. The last steam locomotive to be used on schedule was a class 64 locomotive in May 1967. After that, the two or, from the mid-1970s, the one remaining pair of freight trains until the end of operation of class 260 diesel locomotives were transported.
literature
- Willi Glasbrenner: The history of the branch line Blaufelden-Gerabronn-Langenburg . Hohenloher Druck- und Verlagshaus, Gerabronn 2000, ISBN 3-87354-255-2 .
- Peter-Michael Mihailescu, Matthias Michalke: Forgotten railways in Baden-Württemberg . Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-8062-0413-6 , p. 151-153 .
Web links
- Current website for the route
- Private website with pictures from the 1980s
- Blaufelden – Langenburg route at verkehrsrelektiven.de
- Excerpt from the course book from 1944
- Route pictures at Vergierter Bahnen July 2010
- Article in the Hohenloher Tagblatt March 4, 2011
- Article in the Hohenloher Tagblatt September 22, 2011 ( Memento from September 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- Article in the Hohenloher Tagblatt November 17, 2011
Individual evidence
- ↑ verkehrsrelätze.de: Disused railway lines: building land, Hohenlohe (accessed on June 9, 2008)
- ↑ Gerald's web pages: branch lines in and around Baden-Württemberg (accessed on November 15, 2006)
- ^ Blaufelden - Langenburg. In: vergierter-bahnen.de. May 24, 1965, Retrieved February 19, 2019 .
- ↑ Sleeping Beauty make steam ( Memento from December 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive )