Ellrich – Zorge railway line
| Ellrich West – Zorge (South Harz) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Monument to the Kleinbahn in Zorge
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| Course book range : | 200 d (1945) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Route length: | 7.3 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 1435 mm ( standard gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Ellrich – Zorge railway line (also known as Zorger Willem ) connected Zorge with Ellrich on the southern Harz line for 38 years . The line was initially built by Kleinbahn AG Ellrich-Zorge . The standard-gauge small railway was cut through the zone boundary in 1945 - while the Ellrich station was in the province of Saxony , which was added to the Soviet zone , Zorge came to the Lower Saxony district of Blankenburg , later to the district of Osterode and in 2016 to the district of Göttingen . This led to the closure of the Ellrich Stadt - Zorge section. The remaining section to Ellrich Stadt was closed after the fall of the Wall .
history
planning
As a result of the completion of the Northeim-Nordhausen railway line in 1869, there were also thoughts about a railway connection to the city of Zorge. After initial plans for a 1000mm - narrow-gauge railway from Ellrich Zorge to Benneckenstein where connection to the grid of miniature railway would have existed, could not be realized, it is a standard gauge branch line decided to build after Zorge.
society
In order to collect the necessary capital for the railway construction, the state, the province of Saxony, the district of Grafschaft Hohnstein in Nordhausen and the city of Ellrich participated in Kleinbahn AG Ellrich-Zorge, which was founded on May 14, 1906. In Braunschweig, the state, the Blankenburg district and the communities of Zorge and Hohegeiß were also involved. In addition, the Harz factories took over shares in Rübeland and Zorge .
At the end of 1942, the Kleinbahn-AG changed its name to Eisenbahn-AG Ellrich-Zorge .
In 1949 the company in the GDR was expropriated. In the west the company remained in existence, the administration was carried out on a fiduciary basis by the regional finance directorate Hanover. In 1975 the remaining assets were paid out and the company was deleted.
In 2003 there was a last meeting of the shareholders of the railway company, which formally still existed, at which its final dissolution was decided.
route
Construction work began on October 10, 1906. The 7.3 km long route was completed after only 10 months. After that, the small railway started operations on August 11, 1907, which was run by the small railway department of the Provincial Association of Saxony in Merseburg. In the last weeks of the Second World War, the operation was stopped.
Due to the division of the route due to the zone boundary, traffic could not be resumed after 1945. Only the freight traffic between the stations Ellrich and Ellrich Stadt remained, which was now carried out by the Deutsche Reichsbahn . In addition, the line behind the Ellrich Stadt train station remained in operation until shortly before the zone boundary in order to connect a foundry. This remaining section was also shut down after the fall of the Wall because the last freight customers were no longer available. The section behind the Ellrich Stadt train station to the border was dismantled in the early 1990s, the section to Ellrich Stadt initially remained, as the local sandworks planned to resume rail freight traffic, but this did not succeed.
In the west, freight wagons for the Zorge iron foundry were delivered with Culemeyer road rollers . Between 1965 and 1967 the Unterzorge – Zorge track was dismantled.
Until 2003 there were plans to reactivate the old route for a museum railway , but these failed. As a result, the remaining track section in Ellrich was dismantled and deedicated.
literature
- Manfred Dittmann: Memories of the Southern Harz Railway History - The Kleinbahn Ellrich - Zorge, The Locomotive Construction in Zorge. Verlag H. Greinert, Clausthal-Zellerfeld 1987
- Gerd Wolf: Lower Saxony 3 - South of the Mittelland Canal . In: German small and private railways . tape 11 . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-88255-670-4 , p. 248-252 .
Web links
- Short article on the history of the small train
- Forum thread on the route with a lot of information and pictures
- Course book 1944
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b The Kleinbahn Ellrich-Zorge - a former standard gauge railway between Ellrich and Zorge. Retrieved July 2, 2019 .
- ↑ Gerd Wolf: Lower Saxony 3 - South of the Mittelland Canal . In: German small and private railways . tape 11 . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-88255-670-4 , p. 250 .