Ludwigsstadt – Lehesten railway line

Ludwigsstadt - Lehesten
Route number :	5015
Course book section (DB) :	414z
Route length:	7.6 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Maximum slope :	31.3  ‰
Minimum radius :	150 m
Legend from Probstzella 0.0 Ludwigsstadt 457 m Trogenbach Bridge (200 m) to Hochstadt-Marktzeuln 0.2 Connection WELA Hassbach Viaduct Loquitz Viaduct (35 m) 5.3 State border Bavaria / Thuringia Flyover 7.6 Lehesten 635 m

Loquitz Viaduct on the Bavaria / Thuringia border

The Ludwigsstadt - Lehesten railway was a branch line branching off from the Hochstadt-Marktzeuln – Probstzella railway to Lehesten in southern Thuringia in Ludwigsstadt, Upper Franconia . It was shut down in Thuringia in 1951 and in Bavaria in 1971.

history

Two months after the completion of the Frankenwaldbahn, the 7.6 km long secondary line from Ludwigsstadt to Lehesten was opened in 1885 . In particular, the quarries in Lehesten , which produced 646,226 quintals of roofing and house slate as well as slates in 1880  , were interested in the railway connection. A state treaty between the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Duchy of Saxony-Meiningen , which was signed on June 16, 1884, was necessary for the route . Most of the financing (0.515 million marks) was provided by Sachsen-Meiningen, the construction and operation of the branch line was carried out by the Bavarian State Railway . Construction began in September 1884, and the completed line was opened on December 1, 1885.

The line branches off in Ludwigsstadt south of the Trogenbach bridge in an eastward direction from the Frankenwaldbahn and follows the course of Loquitz and Aue. 5.3 kilometers are in Bavaria and 2.3 kilometers in Thuringia. The Haßbach Viaduct in Ludwigsstadt, the Loquitz Viaduct on the Bavarian / Thuringian border and a road overpass in Thuringia were necessary as larger engineering structures .

Up to 1945 there were usually four pairs of passenger trains a day with travel times of around 25 minutes. In freight transport, the route developed into an important connection for the transport of slate. During the Second World War , the route was used from 1943 to supply the Laura subcamp near Lehesten with methyl alcohol as fuel for the V2 rocket engines that were installed and tested there . The transport of prisoners to and from the concentration camps in Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald also took place via the railway line.

Since after the occupation of Thuringia by Soviet troops on July 3, 1945, the inner-German border crossed the route according to the old state borders, the train connections were discontinued. It was not until June 17, 1947 that freight train traffic was resumed with a pair of regular trains and a pair of trains on demand as transit goods traffic between Probstzella and Lehesten. On July 12, 1951, transit traffic was finally stopped, and the line in Thuringia was dismantled by May 28, 1952.

The route section in Bavaria was officially closed on March 1, 1971. Up until the early 1960s, goods connection traffic to a quarry at route kilometers 2.8 was carried out here. The Haßbach Viaduct, which runs over Bundesstraße 85 , was blown up on April 2, 1973 due to the planned expansion of the Bundesstraße. After that, the railway siding of the WELA soup factory in the urban area of ​​Ludwigsstadt (route kilometer 0.2) was served for a long time before this last remainder of the route was dismantled in 2011 and the connecting switch to the Frankenwaldbahn was expanded.

literature

• Ulrich Rockelmann, Thomas Naumann: The Frankenwaldbahn. The story of the steep ramp over the Franconian Forest . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 1997, ISBN 3-88255-581-5 .
• Kerstin Schäfer, The high-rise buildings of the Upper Franconian branch lines. History, inventory and conversion . Neustadt / Coburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-944237-05-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 65 kilos of explosives create facts In: Neue Presse Coburg , June 4, 2011, p. 18