Montbéliard – Morvillars railway line

Montbéliard – Morvillars
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Legend Belfort RFF route 483.95 Montbeliard Viaduc de l' Allan 56 m Canal du Rhône au Rhin 16 m Montbéliard 535 m 482.15 ? RFF route to Besançon – Dole Audincourt Dasle - Beaucourt Dampierre-les-Bois Fesches-le-Châtel Belfort RFF route ? 456.08 Morvillars 459.60 Grandvillars 464.19 Dent 367  m 464.57 124.53 State border F – CH 369  m above sea level M. SBB route to Delémont

former Audincourt station

The railway Montbéliard Morvillars is a standard gauge railway line in the French department of Doubs and Territoire de Belfort in the region Bourgogne Franche-Comté and is owned by the state-owned rail infrastructure company Réseau Ferré de France (RFF).

history

The line from Montbéliard via Audincourt and Morvillars to Delle was opened on June 29, 1868 by the Compagnie Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM) as a branch line from the main line Belfort-Besançon-Dole .

The connection to Switzerland was made by the Chemin de fer Porrentruy – Delle (PD), which opened its main line from the border station Delle via Boncourt to Porrentruy on September 23, 1872. In Porrentruy there was still no connection to the rest of the Swiss railway network, in which the French were particularly interested, as Delle became the northernmost border station between Switzerland and France with the cession of Alsace to the German Empire in 1871 .

The PD became part of the Jura bernois (JB) in 1876 and was connected to Delémont on March 30, 1877, and thus to the rest of the Swiss railway network. On August 13, 1877, the Compagnie de l'Est (EST) finally opened a connecting line from Belfort to Morvillars (-Delle) , which branches off the main line Paris-Mulhouse in Danjoutin. Between Morvillars and Delle, EST laid its own second track, next to that of PLM. Until the First World War, the route experienced a great boom. Delle passed up to 70 trains a day. The traffic was international: trains ran via Paris to England and in the opposite direction to Italy. The route became even more important after the completion of the Lötschberg tunnel in 1913. With the return of Alsace to France, the most important connections now led via Basel - mainly because it had fewer inclines and fewer curves - and the route became significantly less important.

In 1933 the line from the Swiss side to Delle was electrified. The Swiss demands on the SNCF in 1957 went unheard until 1980.

With the nationalization of the PLM and the EST, the routes became the property of the SNCF on January 1, 1938. The old competitive disadvantage of the significantly longer PLM route via Montbéliard and Morvillars to Delle immediately took hold and passenger traffic on the Montbéliard – Morvillars section was discontinued in the same year.

After the Second World War, freight traffic via Delle decreased steadily, as the routes to the rail border crossings in Basel, Les Verrières and Vallorbe were better developed and gradually electrified. In 1953, the SNCF removed one of two tracks between Morvillars and Delle (originally PLM and EST). Since the local freight traffic also decreased, the Beaucourt – Morvillars section was closed in 1969, later completely dismantled and partially built over in the towns. With the dismantling of the junction in Morvillars, the section after Delle was added to the younger EST line Belfort – Morvillars .

On the remainder of the route, the last freight train ran between Audincourt and Beaucourt in 1990, before the last section Montbéliard – Audincourt was finally closed in 1993. Here, too, some demolitions were carried out in later years - between Audincourt and Beaucourt, the track was removed from a part in favor of a cycle path. The section between Montbéliard and Audincourt, which is basically a little better preserved, also became impassable when the tracks at level crossings were removed.

Web links

• Binari Morti: Le chemin de fer Montbéliard - Audincourt - Morvillars - Delle (fr / it)
• Wiki Trains: Montbéliard - Delle (fr)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Markus Rieder: Lignes ferroviaires régionales - ouvrir, fermer ou moderniser? Schulthess Éditions romandes, Genève 2014, ISBN 978-3-7255-6968-7 , pp. 89-90