Görlitz – Weißenberg railway line

Görlitz West – Weißenberg (Sachs) South
Route number :	6582
Course book range :	232 (1993)
Route length:	26.29 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Maximum slope :	46  ‰
Minimum radius :	200 m
Rack system :	Dept
Top speed:	50 km / h
Legend 0.00 Görlitz West formerly Görlitz Rauschwalder Straße Klbf Anst industrial railway On the Bombardier 1.00 Görlitz industrial station formerly Schlauroth Ost from Görlitz 1.2 Abzw Svt to Berlin Görlitzer Bf (Re-alignment 1948) 1.5 Path underpass (3.85 m) 2.4 Underpass (4.75 m) Bundesstrasse 99 3.0 Anst Görlitz North 4.7 Bridge Ebersbach (43.2 m), Weißer Schöps 5.30 Ebersbach (b Görlitz) (formerly Bf) 205 m 8.16 Königshain -Liebstein 223 m 10.0 Nieder-Königshain 11.43 Königshain-Hochstein 270 m 13.98 Königshain forest 280 m 15.94 Hilbersdorf (Kr Görlitz) 213 m 16.52 Arnsdorf (Kr Görlitz) 200 m 18.58 Döbschütz (formerly Bf) 185 m 22.04 Buchholz (Kr Görlitz) (formerly Bf) 185 m Former border between Prussia and Saxony Löbauer Wasser bridge Connecting track to the Löbau – Radibor railway line 26.74 Weißenberg (Sachs) Süd formerly Weißenberg Klbf 184 m

Share of Görlitzer Kreisbahn-AG for more than 1000 Marks on November 1st, 1906

The Görlitz – Weißenberg railway was a single-track, non-electrified branch line in Saxony and Prussia . It was initially built and operated by the Görlitzer Kreisbahn , a railway company based in Görlitz . It was founded on July 20, 1903. The district and city of Görlitz and the Prussian state were equally involved; the largest share package was taken over by the railway construction company Lenz & Co GmbH , which also ran the company until 1946.

history

The track side of the former Görlitz district station in 2011

The standard-gauge line began at the Rauschwalder Strasse small train station - 1.3 km from the Görlitz state train station - and crossed the former district of Görlitz , which was part of the province of Silesia , in a westerly direction . Scheduled passenger traffic began on June 1, 1905 and led via Königshain to Krischa - Tetta . However, as early as March 20, granite had been transported away by freight trains; because in addition to the general development function, the railway was indispensable for the transport of the granite stones extracted in the Königshain mountains, which were used for buildings in distant cities.

On December 14, 1913, the last 5 km long section to Weißenberg in Saxony was opened, where the state railway line Löbau – Baruth – Radibor was reached. The total length of the track was 27 km. A 1.6 km long rack and pinion line (Abt system) between Königshain-Wald and Hilbersdorf , which was used until 1922 and dismantled in 1936, was remarkable . The operation was initially having C-coupled Zahnradloks ( Lenz type bz unwound) before the transition to the adhesion operation three Dh2 -Lokomotiven type ELNA 6 with Riggenbach - counter-pressure brake were procured.

At the industrial station in the north-west of Görlitz there was a siding to the Görlitz wagon construction , two butt tracks to the locomotive shed of the district railway and a transfer track to the state railway. In the direction of the district station, the industrial railway branched off from the eastward route with numerous connections. In 1925 the industrial railway had 25 affiliated companies. These included the city of Görlitz with an open loading siding, the municipal slaughterhouse, the Upper Lusatian Aid Association , the Kosmos machine factory , the Silesian Raiffeisen Society , the Silesian Montan Society , the Upper Lusatian Glassworks Lower Silesia , the Paul Donath forwarding agency and the Consum Association . Furthermore, the Waaren -kauf-Verein , the Industriebau AG and the Rotunda Werk owned siding in the city area.

After the Second World War , the part of Lower Silesia west of the Lusatian Neisse came to the state of Saxony. As a private railway, the company (mostly in public hands) was expropriated on July 1, 1946 in favor of the State of Saxony and handed over to the Deutsche Reichsbahn for management on March 31, 1947; the official incorporation took place on May 11, 1948. The passenger trains now drove to the Görlitz station as the end point, which meant that the route of the passenger trains had become 800 m longer. The three ELNA locomotives were henceforth designated as the 92 ²⁹ series. In addition to these, Prussian T 9.3 and T 12 were also used later . The passenger trains were mostly made up of makeshift passenger cars of the MCi-43 series and new baggage cars . In the 1970s, the steam locomotives were replaced by diesel locomotives of the V 100 series , which ran in front of passenger trains with two- and three-axle, later four-axle Reko cars .

The line was operated until after the end of the GDR . However, passenger traffic to the west of Königshain-Hochstein had already ceased on May 27, 1972 (officially on October 1), while goods traffic ended there earlier. Most recently, the passenger trains were on the move for an hour and a half on the 28 km long route. On the eastern section, freight traffic came to an end in 1975 when the quarry operations in the Königshain Mountains were closed.

After the superstructure was renewed, the travel time between Görlitz and Königshain-Hochstein was later almost halved to 25 minutes. Nevertheless, the railways were no longer competitive after 1990 and passenger traffic on the Görlitz – Königshain-Hochstein route ended on May 22, 1993. Freight traffic continued until December 31, 1994. On November 24, 1997 the closure of the line was approved by the Federal Railway Authority and completed on December 20, 1997.

After the cessation of operations, an association made efforts to set up museum traffic on the route. Parked dilapidated wagons on the railway station in Königshain-Hochstein still bear witness to this project today.

Part of the track between Görlitz and Königshain-Hochstein was dismantled at the end of the 1990s. An approximately 8.5 km long cycle path was built on the former railway line and was inaugurated on April 30, 2009. Among other things, it serves as a link between the Spreeradweg and the Neißeradweg .

literature

• Wolfgang Fiegenbaum, Wolfgang Klee: Farewell to Rails 1991-1995 . 2nd Edition. Stuttgart 1999
• Hans-Dieter Rammelt: Archive of German Small and Private Railways - Thuringia / Saxony . Berlin 1994
• Jochen Fink: The Görlitzer Kreisbahn 1945 . In: Die Museums-Eisenbahn, 44 (2008), Issue 1, pp. 10–15
• Wilfried Rettig: The Görlitzer Kreisbahn - The story of an unusual small train . EK-Verlag, Freiburg (2007) ISBN 3-88255-591-2

Footnotes

1. ^ Wilfried Rettig: Railway in the three-country corner. East Saxony (D) / Lower Silesia (PL) / North Bohemia (CZ). Part 2: secondary, small and narrow-gauge railways, railway operations and repair shops, railway mail . EK-Verlag, Freiburg (Breisgau) 2011, ISBN 978-3-88255-733-6 , p. 122 .
2. ^ Wilfried Rettig: Görlitz railway junction . Bufe-Fachbuch-Verlag, Egglham 1994, ISBN 3-922138-53-5 , p. 122 .
3. ↑ Martin Krauss: Development of the Railway Infrastructure 1997/98, in: Bahn-Report 2/1999, p. 4–7, here: p. 7.
4. ↑ eba.bund.de: List of 1994 disused state-owned routes in the state of Saxony . (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 28, 2016 ; Retrieved March 5, 2013 . 

Web links

Commons : Görlitz – Weißenberg railway line  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Website for the Görlitzer Kreisbahn
• Railway line Görlitz – Weißenberg on oberlausitzer-eisenbahnen.de
• Early documents and newspaper articles on Görlitzer Kreisbahn AG in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .