Eilsleben – Schöningen railway line

Eilsleben - Schöningen
Schöningen station, 2012
Route number (DB) :	6874
Course book section (DB) :	last 234 (DB) , 732 (DR)
Route length:	17.9 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Route class :	C4
Legend from Magdeburg from Blumenberg from Haldensleben 171.7 Express life 144 m to Braunschweig 177.7 Bath life 179.5 Völpke (Kr Oschersleben) 181.2 Völpke coal collection station after Harbke State border between Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony Off life from Helmstedt 189.0 Schöningen to Braunschweig and Oschersleben to Wolfenbüttel

The Eilsleben - Schöningen railway line is a disused, temporarily double-track main line connection between the present-day states of Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony . The approximately 18-kilometer-long railway connected the places Eilsleben and Völpke on the Saxony-Anhalt side and Offleben and Schöningen on the Lower Saxony side. It was interrupted by the division of Germany ; the remaining sections were operated as a branch line until they were closed .

history

Since 1846, Berlin and Magdeburg were linked by the Berlin-Potsdam-Magdeburg Railway Company (BPME). The western continuation took place via the routes of the Magdeburg-Halberstädter Railway Company and the Duke Braunschweigische Staatseisenbahn with a detour via Oschersleben (Bode) . The BPME therefore examined the possibility of extending its own route to the Duchy of Braunschweig . Braunschweig and Schöningen or Jerxheim , where there was a connection to the Braunschweig State Railway, were to serve as the western endpoints . However, the Magdeburg Fortress and the restrictive building regulations associated with it caused problems . In 1868 the Prussian military administration provided the Berlin-Potsdam-Magdeburg Railway, the Magdeburg-Halberstädter Railway and the Magdeburg-Cöthen-Halle-Leipzig Railway with 28 hectares of building land for the construction of a new Magdeburg central station , today's Magdeburg Hauptbahnhof . At the same time, BPME began the preparatory work for the routes from Magdeburg via Eilsleben to Helmstadt and Schöningen. The state treaty for the construction of the railway between Prussia and the Duchy of Braunschweig was ratified on May 27, 1868. On December 14, 1868, the Prussian side of the BPME issued the concession document for the construction, the analogous document from Braunschweig was issued on February 18, 1868. In the spring of 1869, construction work began on both routes. The company used mainly seasonal workers from the Prussian provinces of Brandenburg , Posen and West Prussia , as the local workers were needed in agriculture. At the end of July 1870, the BPME had to stop work temporarily because there was a labor shortage as a result of the Franco-German War . At the end of 1871, the construction of the line continued, with the company now also being able to fall back on French prisoners of war. On August 15, 1872, the first work train ran between Magdeburg, Eilsleben and Schöningen, a month later, on September 15, 1872, both connections were opened. The direct connection to the main route of the BPME followed on May 15, 1873 together with the opening of Magdeburg Central Station. The connections then belonged to the most important east-west routes in the German Empire .

On April 1, 1880, the Prussian State Railroad took over operations on the line after the BPME had previously been nationalized. The line was subordinate to the Royal Railway Directorate Magdeburg , which was run as the Reichsbahndirektion Magdeburg from 1922 .

In the summer of 1896, three pairs of trains from Eilsleben to Schöningen and one pair of trains from Magdeburg Hbf to Schöningen ran the route every day, plus courier trains 141 and 142, which ran without stopping at the subway stations. As a result of the lignite mining in the Helmstedter Revier , there was also a significant increase in freight traffic . In Völpke 1898 was a briquette factory in operation, which was connected to the track via a separate carbon collection station. The Eilsleben station was therefore expanded between 1912 and 1922 . After the First World War , the importance shifted further in favor of freight transport. Whereas in the summer of 1914 there were six or seven trains running between Eilsleben and Schöningen, there were still four or three trains in the summer of 1921. Then there was the D-Zug pair 179/180 Berlin - Cologne  - Saarbrücken . After a landslide near Schöningen that interrupted the route for a long time, the Deutsche Reichsbahn , founded in 1920, relocated the last express train connection via Helmstedt . From 1924 the Reichsbahn increased the timetable to five pairs of trains between Eilsleben and Börßum every day, and individual trains between Schöningen and Eilsleben or Völpke were added on weekdays.

As a result of the global economic crisis , lignite production initially fell sharply, so that at the beginning of the 1930s only two pairs of local goods trains traveled the route. For its part, the Reichsbahn was forced to reduce its administrative costs. It therefore dissolved the Reichsbahndirektion Magdeburg on October 1, 1931 and subordinated the routes to the Reichsbahndirektion Hannover . In the summer of 1937, five pairs of passenger trains and eight pairs of freight trains ran on the route every day. During the Second World War , the number of passenger trains was reduced in favor of additional freight train connections.

On April 12, 1945, the Eilsleben station was captured by the US Army , the line was then initially within the British zone of occupation . On July 1, 1945, according to the Potsdam Agreement , Soviet troops occupied the area up to the agreed demarcation line between Völpke and Offleben . By order of the SMAD , the cross-border traffic was stopped and the second track dismantled. By spring 1948, a few freight trains are said to have passed the zone border, but this claim is not certain. Exact data on the dismantling of the route in the border region are also not available. From October 18, 1945, the section of the route remaining in the Soviet Zone was under the re-established Magdeburg Railway Directorate .

From 1950 the area around Badeleben was opened up for the extraction of lawn iron stone. In 1951, the Badeleben stop went into operation for the workforce. From this time on, passenger traffic was increasingly limited to commuter traffic , after the border was further secured from spring 1947. From May 26, 1952, the Völpke station, four kilometers from the border, could only be reached with a pass . The same also applied to the personnel of the Reichsbahn . From the 1958 summer timetable, the Reichsbahn operated six pairs of passenger trains on the branch line, two of which were passenger trains with goods transport . Four pairs of passenger trains ran on Sundays and public holidays, and another pair of trains was used on Saturdays. In freight traffic, two block trains also ran to the Völpke briquette factory. The offer remained for a long time.

From the mid-1950s, the condition of the superstructure deteriorated, so that the Reichsbahn reduced the line's top speed from 50 to 30 km / h. With increasing motorization in the 1960s, demand in passenger transport also fell. At the same time, VEB Kraftverkehr Oschersleben improved its bus offer. In 1968, the connection, which was only run as a branch line, had a total of 4.7 kilometers of speed limits , which stipulated a reduction to 20, in places also 10 km / h. The travel time increased from 14 minutes in the summer of 1958 to over 20 minutes. The Rbd Magdeburg therefore intended to shut down the line from 1966, which was initially set for June 1, 1969. Since VEB Kraftverkehr did not have enough buses available at that time , the cessation of passenger traffic was postponed to September 25, 1971.

Freight traffic lasted almost 20 years longer on the eastern section, but had also declined since the 1960s. The reason for this was the discontinuation of the lawn iron stone mining, as the GDR could increasingly fall back on imported ore from the USSR . The Reichsbahn therefore introduced the simplified branch line operation on the railway, which meant that the signal boxes in Völpke and Badeleben could be omitted. At the end of the 1970s, the Reichsbahn had the line repaired as part of the central superstructure renewal. Two to three pairs of local goods trains served the route every day, and from May 1981 they were operated as a transfer train . After the Wulfersdorf opencast mine was closed, the briquette and montan wax factory obtained its raw materials by block train from Profen .

With the fall of the Wall , the briquette factory initially drastically reduced its production, and on March 31, 1992 it was shut down. The montan wax factory was retained, but in future it procured its raw materials by street. For the timetable change in May 1992, the offer was therefore reduced to a pair of transfer trains. On January 8th, the Reichsbahndirektion Halle, which had been in charge since 1990, proposed that the infrastructure be handed over to a private operator, for which no one was found. In addition, the superstructure would have had to be replaced over a length of five kilometers due to alkali damage (“ concrete cancer ”). On December 31, 1994, the newly founded Deutsche Bahn therefore ceased operations. The Federal Railway Authority approved the closure of the line on June 1, 1996.

Passenger traffic on the western section between Schöningen and Offleben lasted until May 21, 1955, after which it consisted of a single pair of trains every working day until 1974. On April 1, 1974, the Deutsche Bundesbahn stopped all traffic and had the section dismantled. In the meantime, the lignite mining has expanded to the site of the route.

literature

• Hans-Joachim Fricke, Hans-Joachim Ritzau: The inner-German border and rail traffic . 3. Edition. Zeit und Eisenbahn Verlag, Pürgen 1992, ISBN 3-921304-45-8 .

Web links

• Tradition on the Eilsleben-Schöningen railway line in the holdings of the Reichsbahndirektion Magdeburg in the State Archives Saxony-Anhalt, Dessau department

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dirk Endisch: The branch lines of the Magdeburg Börde . Verlag Dirk Endisch, Stendal 2012, ISBN 978-3-936893-35-9 , p. 169-171 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Dirk Endisch: The branch lines of the Magdeburger Börde . Verlag Dirk Endisch, Stendal 2012, ISBN 978-3-936893-35-9 , p. 171-176 .
3. ↑ Hendschels Telegraph . Table 800 May 1914 ( digitized version 1 2 [accessed December 3, 2016]).
4. ↑ ^{a b} Dirk Endisch: The branch lines of the Magdeburg Börde . Verlag Dirk Endisch, Stendal 2012, ISBN 978-3-936893-35-9 , p. 176-181 .
5. ↑ ^{a b} Dirk Endisch: The branch lines of the Magdeburg Börde . Verlag Dirk Endisch, Stendal 2012, ISBN 978-3-936893-35-9 , p. 181-184 .