Bucureşti – Galați – Roman railway line
The Bucharest – Galați – Roman railway is a main line in Romania . It leads in the east of the country from the capital Bucharest mainly northwards through Wallachia and Moldova .
history
Basics
After the unification of the country in 1859, the Romanian governments set themselves the goal of promoting the country, which was backward by European standards - which was still under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire - economically by building railways. For this purpose, the larger cities of the country should be connected. Two larger routes were planned from Bucharest : one to the west to the Austro-Hungarian border, one to the north into the Vltava . In 1868, the German entrepreneur Bethel Henry Strousberg received the concessions to build the planned routes and started work that same year.
The route led mostly through flat terrain. There, however, numerous rivers made construction difficult, which - also due to the uncontrolled deforestation of the forests in the Wallachian Plain - often changed their course and made it necessary to build expensive bridges. Because of the poor traffic conditions on land, rails and other building materials had to be imported via the Danube ports of Brăila and Galați . Most of the skilled workers came from abroad.
Start of operation
By 1870, the Strousberg consortium was able to complete around three quarters of the line and started operations on these sections. The unexpectedly high costs, legal problems with the acquisition of the necessary land and the hesitant progress of the construction led to increasing disputes between the consortium and the Romanian state.
In 1871 the Romanian government withdrew the concession for construction and operation from Strousberg. These were taken over by a "Romanian Railway Company" under the leadership of the bankers Gerson Bleichröder and Adolph von Hansemann .
On September 13, 1872, the railway line could be opened continuously, but the expansion dragged on until 1875. In 1880 the newly established Romanian state railway company CFR took over the route.
20th and 21st centuries
The section from Bucharest to Ploieşti was expanded to double-track in 1909 as the first railway line in Romania .
On May 31, 1966, a serious railway accident occurred at route kilometer 8 : an express train that had recently left Bucharest for Galați collided with a local train. 38 people died, 65 were also injured. As a result of the accident, the Minister of Transport was dismissed for “tolerating repeated lack of discipline”.
In 2010, the infrastructure operator CFR SA placed an order to equip a 37 km section between Bucharest and Ploieşti with ETCS Level 2 (with signals). The first application of ETCS in Romania has a volume of 271 million lei . Thales, Siemens and Nokia were commissioned. Commissioning took place on December 12, 2015.
Current situation
The entire line is double-track and electrified with alternating current (25 kV, 50 Hz) . It is heavily frequented by both passenger and freight traffic. Today, however, it is no longer used by passenger trains that use the entire route, as routes were built later that shorten the route described here (e.g. Buzău – Mărăşeşti ).
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Lothar Maier: Romania on the way to the declaration of independence 1866–1877: appearance and reality of a liberal constitution and state sovereignty . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1989. pp. 170-179
- ^ Carsten Burhop: The credit banks in the early days . Fritz Steiner-Verlag, 2004. p. 219. ISBN 3-515-08413-4
- ↑ a b CFR website, accessed on April 8, 2009 ( Memento of the original from June 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ CFR website, accessed on April 8, 2009 ( Memento of the original from June 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ^ Peter WB Semmens: Catastrophes on rails. A worldwide documentation. Transpress, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-344-71030-3 , p. 171.
- ^ Lick Kingsley: 'Rail can contribute more' . In: Railway Gazette International . tape 172 , no. 1 , 2016, ISSN 0373-5346 , p. 27-29 .
