Finsterwalde – Schipkau railway line

Finsterwalde – Schipkau
Route number (DB) :	6571 (Ruhland – Lauchhammer Ost) 6591 (Finsterwalde – Annahütte)
Course book section (DB) :	177k, 177m (old) 178d
Route length:	40.3 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Maximum slope :	10  ‰
Top speed:	40 km / h
Legend from Halle (Saale) from Luckau 0.0 Finsterwalde (Lower Lusatia ) to Cottbus 1.4 Crowds 3.6 to Finsterwalde / Schacksdorf airfield 4.0 Schacksdorf (formerly Bf) Junction of the Klettwitz open-cast mine ( LMBV ) and to Hp Lichterfeld F60 8.5 Klingmühl - Lichterfeld 11.5 0.0 Sallgast 4.7 Roman cellar 7.6 Cost brew 12.8 11.8 Lauchhammer North 7.6 Lauchhammer East 3.0 Schwarzheide BASF GmbH Schwarzheide BASF (gate / access DB) Schwarzheide BASF (formerly Tor) from Senftenberg 0.0 Ruhland to Grossenhain 13.6 Poley 15.1 Annahütte from the glassworks 16.4 Klettwitz Hospital to the Wilhelminensglück factory site 17.6 Klettwitz 20.2 0.0 Schipkau to Senftenberg

The Finsterwalde – Schipkau railway was a railway line in Lower Lusatia in Brandenburg . It was initially operated by the Schipkau-Finsterwalder Railway Company (until 1938 Zschipkau-Finsterwalder Railway - ZFE ), which was founded in 1885 to connect the rich brown coal and clay pits around Zschipkau between Finsterwalde and Senftenberg to the railway network. The railway line was also known as Schippchenbahn or Zschippchenbahn .

history

Seal of the Zschipkau-Finsterwalder Railway Company

Zschipkau-Finsterwalder Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft shares of RM 1000 on December 21, 1928

The province of Brandenburg, the districts of Luckau and Calau and the city of Finsterwalde participated in the company's capital, as did the railway construction company Davy, Donath & Co. from Berlin, which built and initially operated the line.

The 20-kilometer main line Finsterwalde – Zschipkau was opened on September 20, 1887. A branch line branched off from the Sallgast station, which is roughly in the middle of the route, and went into operation as a small railway on April 1, 1896 to Costebrau-Friedrichsthal (8 km) and extended by another 4 km as a works railway to Lauchhammer (works) on December 16, 1897 has been. From September 1, 1902, this branch received the status of a branch line, which was connected to the Lauchhammer (East) state train station, which had been connected to the Ruhland railway node since 1875 by the Upper Lusatian Railway Company .

Another connection to the main line Cottbus – Dresden was established on October 1, 1905, when the Prussian State Railway opened its Zschipkau – Senftenberg line, which had already existed as a private industrial line. For this route to Senftenberg, ZFE also took over the operational management of the passenger traffic.

The heavy freight traffic made the ZFE so profitable that the Deutsche Reichsbahn tried to nationalize it. But it was only successful on July 1, 1943.

Lost train

From April 19 to 20, 1945, the last of three death transports from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp made a two-day stopover in Schipkau. The approaching front was only 30 kilometers away, the odyssey seemed to have come to an end, but on April 20 the train continued to Finsterwalde.

51 people who had died during the stay as a result of illnesses and malnutrition were buried in three mass graves. 31 corpses are still lying here today, the others were reburied in the Schipkau cemetery after the war. Where the siding used to run, there is now a memorial for the 51 victims of the lost train .

Post war and shutdown

former administration building in Finsterwalde

In the 1950s, the Klettwitz open-cast mine moved closer to the route, a new mine was opened between Sallgast and Kostebrau , and the Sallgast – Kostebrau section was closed and dismantled. The gradual derailment was now sealed. Passenger traffic between Lauchhammer-Ost and Kostebrau ceased on September 30, 1962. The Senftenberg − Schipkau section was used more and more as a siding for the new Klettwitz and Meuro opencast mines . Numerous mine railways were built parallel to the route and crossed the route. Passenger traffic increasingly shifted to the road, and on May 22, 1966, passenger traffic between Senftenberg and Klettwitz was discontinued . The remaining section Annahütte –Finsterwalde was discontinued on May 28, 1967. Freight traffic initially remained, the last section between Finsterwalde and Annahütte was not discontinued until May 22, 1993. The reason for this was the closure of the Annahütte glassworks and the withdrawal of the Soviet air forces from Schacksdorf . Today, except for the first section from Finsterwalde, all routes are largely closed, dismantled or impassable.

Reactivation of passenger traffic

The Teichland-Express on its way to Lichterfeld, in the foreground the route to Sallgast (September 2017)

The line was bought by the municipalities from DB Netz AG in 2009 and sold on to the private rail operator Torsten Ratke. This had carried out a first cut in 2010 and carried out the first special trips with a V60 and open wagons in April 2010. In 2011 the railcar 772 342 from the Lausitzer Steam Locomotive Club was used. In 2011 and 2012 there were special public trips between Finsterwalde and Schacksdorf .

From June 1, 2014 to October 31, 2014, there was a shuttle service with a historic railcar from Doberlug-Kirchhain and Finsterwalde to the new platform of the F60 visitor mine on Sundays . After repeating it in 2015, traffic was expanded in 2016. The Sunday journeys already started in Falkenberg (Elster). In 2015 and 2016 there were trips from Lichterfeld to Doberlug-Kirchhain and to Falkenberg (Elster). Due to the high train path prices, these train pairs, which run once a day, have been canceled. The trips to the visitor mine F60 now start again in Finsterwalde.

The modernization of the Finsterwalder train station was completed in 2017. Dispensable areas of the station, the reception building and the adjacent former signal box are now also owned by the infrastructure operator and will be preserved as a whole. It is planned to lengthen a siding and to provide it with a platform edge so that the commuting can start and end directly at the Finsterwalder train station without hindering the train journeys on the main line.

Freight transport

Furthermore, the connections to BASF Schwarzheide on the Schippchenbahn and a steel wire factory are served en masse directly on the route.

literature

• Zschipkau-Finsterwalder Railway. In: Newspaper of the Association of German Railway Administrations, Volume 52, No. 79 (October 12, 1912), pp. 1259–1260.
• Erich Preuß: Archive of German small and private railways. Brandenburg / Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . transpress, 1994, ISBN 3-344-70906-2 , pp. 169-173 .

Web links

• Website of the operator BCG Officeconsult
• Website of the Lokschuppen Herzberg on the history of the Zschipkau-Finsterwalder Railway (ZFE)
• Website of the Pro Bahn passenger association on the ZFE route history ( memento from September 29, 2007 in the web archive archive.today )
• verkehrsrelktionen.de - in the section: Branch lines: Finsterwalde - Schipkau, Senftenberg - Schipkau and junction Sallgast - Lauchhammer
• Early documents and newspaper articles on the Finsterwalde – Schipkau railway line in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Old lady lives on at 130. Retrieved October 4, 2017 . 
2. ↑ With the RE 3 to the visitor mine F60 ( Memento from February 9, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ), press release on f60.de.
3. ↑ Extension of the range to the F 60 to Lichterfeld . In: railway magazine . No. 8 , 2016, ISSN  0342-1902 , p. 36 .