Dinkelscherben – Thannhausen railway line

Dinkelscherben – Thannhausen
Route number :	5341
Course book section (DB) :	410e (sometimes also 410c, 410d)
Route length:	13.857 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Maximum slope :	33.33  ‰
Minimum radius :	190 m
Legend from Ulm 0.000 Shards of spelled 461.3  m to Augsburg 2,676 Oberschoneberg 481.2  m 5.653 Uttenhofen 474.5  m 7.805 Ziemetshausen 479  m 11.000 Vertex 13,857 Thannhausen 496  m

The Dinkelscherben – Thannhausen railway was a 13.9 km long branch line built in 1894 in the Bavarian district of Swabia . The line, which was always operated by the respective state railway , was used for passenger transport until 1966 and for freight traffic until 1999, before it was closed on December 15, 2001.

Planning and opening

From the middle of the 1880s, the communities of Thannhausen and Ziemetshausen tried harder to get a connection to the railway network. So it was proposed - without success - that the planned railway line to the district town of Krumbach should not branch off in Günzburg , but in Dinkelscherben from the existing Ulm – Augsburg connection and thus lead via Thannhausen. It was not until the Oettingen-Wallerstein company announced that it would participate in the construction costs, as well as the stadium family's commitment to surrender twelve days of free-of-charge land intended for railway construction , made the decision to install a local Dinkelscherben – Thannhausen railway on 26. Law enacted in May 1892 and published five days later to include the production of railways of local importance for the Kingdom of Bavaria .

The Royal Bavarian State Railways (K.Bay.Sts.B) then began building the railway line in early 1894. From the Dinkelscherben station on the main line it led via Oberschöneberg and Uttenhofen , where stops were built, to Ziemetshausen and - with a maximum gradient of 1:33 - on to Thannhausen. The opening ceremony took place on December 15, 1894, and regular operations began on the following Monday, December 17, 1894.

An extension of the line beyond Thannhausen to Kirchheim, the end point of a branch line from Pfaffenhausen on the Mittelschwabenbahn , was publicly discussed , especially in the years after the First World War , and was mentioned in a memorandum on the expansion of the Bavarian rail network on January 30, 1920 submitted to the Bavarian state parliament and adjusted again on March 27, 1920. However, with the inflation of 1923 at the latest , these plans were discarded.

In 1963, as part of the land consolidation, the route at Oberschöneberg was changed and shortened by 200 m.

Operational development

The first timetable for the route provided for four passenger trains per day in each direction. In 1908 the plan was expanded to include five pairs of trains after the fifth-best passenger transport numbers were achieved on the 14 branch lines in Swabia. Three to five daily connections, six pairs of trains from the 1950s, were the usual offer for the entire operating time.

From 1928, however, there was competition for passenger transport in the form of a bus connection (Krumbach–) Thannhausen – Dinkelscherben. The buses were able to cover the route faster than the trains, whose travel time over 13.9 km was 40 to 55 minutes until the middle of the 20th century and 28 to 40 minutes from the 1950s. When a direct bus line (Krumbach–) Thannhausen – Augsburg was set up in the 1950s, which saved travelers the need to change to and the detour via Dinkelscherben, and motorized individual transport increased, the number of passengers on the branch line continued to decline. On September 24, 1966, rail passenger transport was finally stopped.

In terms of freight traffic, the route was primarily used to transport agricultural products. In 1976 the general cargo traffic was stopped. Important freight customers were a feed manufacturer in Thannhausen, the branch of Kässbohrer Fahrzeugwerke in Burtenbach , which loaded truck trailers produced there in Thannhausen onto the train, a manufacturer of plastic parts in Ziemetshausen and the company Gerstlauer Elektro GmbH in Münsterhausen , the rides over the Thannhausen train station sent. In the mid-1990s, however, the volume of goods - which had been quite considerable just a few years earlier - fell sharply and was recently largely limited to grain transports. In the 1980s, the track system was extensively renovated.

After DB Cargo ceased freight transport on January 31, 2000, the infrastructure operator DB Netz finally applied for the line to be closed, which was approved by the Federal Railway Authority on November 19, 2001 and completed on December 14, 2001. The tracks were then dismantled at the beginning of 2007 with the exception of a few hundred meters long section at Dinkelscherben station that was still sporadically used as a siding.

Vehicle use

From the 1920s to the mid-1950s steam locomotives were series 98.8 used before then in passenger railcars rare series VT 70.9 of the railway depot Augsburg were used. For a short period of time, the goods were transported by class 64 steam locomotives before the steam locomotive era on the line to Thannhausen came to an end in 1959. Since then, the diesel locomotives of the V 60 series (260 series) have dominated both passenger and freight transport, before the 333 series (Köf III) diesel locomotives , since the 1980s, the 212 and 290 series for hauling freight trains were used. An interesting combination was the VS 145 series , which was temporarily used as a passenger car (originally built as a control car) with a V60 covering.

literature

• Siegfried Baum: Swabian Railway . The traffic history of the local railways in Central Swabia. Verlag Wolfgang Zimmer, Eppstein im Taunus 1969.
• Michael Baumgärtner, Jürgen Fiedler: Only one branch line: Dinkelscherben-Thannhausen . In: Eisenbahn-Journal . No. 3/1997 , p. 27 ff .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Siegfried Baum: Dinkelscherben - Thannhausen (Schwab) . In: secondary and narrow-gauge railways in Germany (compilation as loose-leaf edition) . Weltbild Verlag, 1994, ISSN  0949-2143 .
2. ^ Overview of the railway legislation in Bavaria in 1892 on a private website
3. ^ Robert Zintl: Bavarian branch lines . Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 978-3-87943-531-9 .
4. ↑ Local railways considered worth building by the Bavarian state government in the memorandum on the expansion of the Bavarian rail network on a private website
5. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Baumgärtner, Jürgen Fiedler: Only one branch line: Dinkelscherben-Thannhausen . In: Eisenbahn-Journal . No. 3/1997 , p. 27 ff .
6. ↑ timetable table 410e Dinkelscherben – Thannhausen in the course book 1944; Schedule table 410d in the 1962 timetable
7. ↑ ^{a b} Alteneder, W., Schüssler, C .: The branch lines of the BD Munich, Bonn 1987, p. 162
8. ↑ Reinhold Breubeck: railway junction Augsburg. The railway in Central Swabia and Upper Bavaria between the Iller and the Isar . Eisenbahn-Fachbuch-Verlag, Neustadt / Coburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-9810681-1-5 , p. 197 .
9. ^ "The last railroad track (in Ziemetshausen) was dismantled ": Report in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung of February 21, 2007
10. ↑ Photo documentation of the dismantling of the Dinkelscherben – Thannhausen railway on a private website
11. ↑ Michael Baumgärtner, Jürgen Fiedler: Only one branch line: Dinkelscherben-Thannhausen . In: Eisenbahn-Journal . No. 3/1997 , p. 27 .