Pritzwalk – Suckow railway line

Pritzwalk – Suckow
Railcar at the Putlitz terminus (2008)
Route number :	6945
Course book section (DB) :	209.70 (to?) , 120g (1944)
Route length:	28.9 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Top speed:	50 km / h
Legend from Meyenburg and Wittstock (Dosse) 0.0 Pritzwalk to Neustadt (Dosse) to Perleberg 1.3 Pritzwalk West (since 2007) 5.7 Cow beer 8.3 Big Langerwisch 10.2 Jakobsdorf (Prign) 12.5 Laaske 15.7 Putlitz Süd (special stop for events) 17.1 Putlitz to mountains 21.7 Nettelbeck 24.2 Porep State border Brandenburg - Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 26.1 Drenkow 28.2 Suckow breakpoint 28.9 Suckow (Kr. Parchim) (formerly: Suckow (border)) to Parchim

The Pritzwalk – Suckow railway is a single-track branch line in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg . The Pritzwalk – Putlitz section is still in operation, the remaining section has been closed. The scheduled train service ended on July 29, 2016, the short section between Pritzwalk and Pritzwalk West will also be served by passenger trains afterwards.

history

Today's line ends at Putlitz station

Railway bridge in the dismantled section at Nettelbeck

The Pritzwalk - Putlitz line was opened on June 4, 1896 as a small railway in the Ostprignitz district . Efforts to extend it to the Mecklenburg border were made from the start, but commissioning was delayed because emphasis was placed on a connection through Mecklenburg in the direction of Parchim . On October 1, 1912, the section from Putlitz to Suckow finally went into operation. The extension in the direction of Parchim was operated by the Friedrich-Franz-Eisenbahn , the Mecklenburg State Railway, which was incorporated into the Reichseisenbahnen in 1918 . The Pritzwalk – Suckow line, however, remained the property of the district. Accordingly, the traffic in Suckow was also broken, travelers usually had to change trains. Only from the end of the 1930s there were continuous trains from Pritzwalk to Parchim. In 1941 all the normal and narrow gauge Prignitz small railways were merged into one company, the small railways of the West and East Prignitz districts.

After 1945 the operation came to the general management of the Provincial Railways in Mark Brandenburg and in 1949 to the Deutsche Reichsbahn . The Suckow – Parchim line was dismantled in 1945 as a reparation payment to the Soviet Union. Although the end point Suckow was only a village with far fewer than a thousand inhabitants and was already on the other side of the state border (from 1952 district border between the districts of Potsdam and Schwerin ), the connection remained in operation for a long time. It was not until 1980 that it had to give way to the construction of the motorway to Hamburg . The traffic to Suckow was stopped on June 1, 1980. School traffic remained on the Putlitz – Porep section until September 28, 1980. Freight traffic on this section had ceased on October 15, 1979. The route was then dismantled. The remnant stretch from Pritzwalk to Putlitz was also supposed to be shut down at that time, but this failed due to the policy of the GDR government to save fuel.

After the turnaround and the changes in the mobility behavior of the population, the importance of the remaining section decreased further. There were rumors of recruitment several times. In June 1993 the bridge over the Dömnitz near Groß Langerwisch was destroyed by a flood. However, at the end of November 1993, traffic was resumed.

Rail bus of the Prignitzer Eisenbahn in Pritzwalk station on the platform towards Putlitz (1997)

In June 1996 the Prignitzer Eisenbahn GmbH (PEG) was founded with headquarters in Putlitz. On September 29 of the same year, it took over traffic on this route, initially on behalf of DB Regio , and from 1998 directly on behalf of the State of Brandenburg. Former Federal Railroad rail buses were initially used . Since January 1, 2004, the PEG has also been operating the railway infrastructure , and ownership rights have passed to the Prignitz district , the legal successor to the former owner. As of December 2006, traffic on the route through the country was canceled, the infrastructure remained in operation, as the PEG continued to park vehicles in Putlitz. RegioInfra Gesellschaft mbH (RIG) has been operating the infrastructure since July 10, 2012 . RIG had taken over the PEG subsidiary Prignitzer Eisenbahn Infrastruktur GmbH with retroactive effect from January 1, 2012.

Pritzwalk West stop

On August 27, 2007, the new Pritzwalk West stop was set up near a high school. At the beginning and the end of school, several trains from Meyenburg were extended to Pritzwalk West. A little later, traffic in the direction of Putlitz was resumed. The operation was carried out without an order from the state by the Prignitz transport company (VGP) in cooperation with the Putlitz-Pritzwalker Eisenbahnförderverein. The financing came from subsidies for bus replacement services and funds for school transport. Six pairs of trains ran between Pritzwalk and Putlitz from Monday to Friday. LVT / S railcars were initially used, followed by Uerdingen rail buses that were taken over as needed . There was also one train in the morning on school days from Meyenburg to Pritzwalk West, and two in the early afternoon in the opposite direction.

With the expiry of the five-year subsidy for bus replacement services, the trains between Pritzwalk and Putlitz, which were set up in 2007, should be discontinued in December 2012. The transport company Prignitz (VGP), which had made this traffic possible by reallocating funds from bus to rail services, saw no financial possibility of maintaining this traffic as of December due to the discontinuation. In November 2012, VGP announced that it would continue to operate the route until December 2014. The city of Putlitz contributed 10,000 euros to securing the route, and there were also individual changes in service between rail and parallel bus services.

In 2014, the route was extended for another year. The transport services took over the Hanseatische Eisenbahn GmbH. She used the 798 610 rail bus, and a class 670 multiple unit was used in the event of breakdowns . Scheduled passenger traffic on the route ended on July 29, 2016. The school trains between Meyenburg and Pritzwalk West run to Putlitz even after the traffic has ceased. In 2017, the line at the Pritzwalk West stop is due to be interrupted due to the construction of a new level crossing.

In February 2018, the RegioInfra Nordost tendered the section from kilometer 1.33 behind the Pritzwalk West stop to Laaske for takeover by third parties or for closure. As part of the renovation of the level crossing at the stop, it should be possible to turn the trains directly at the stop, while they previously had to drive up to the operating stop Pritzwalk switching section (km 2.18). Between Laaske and Putlitz, island operation in occasional traffic should still be possible. The section was shut down by order of the state on July 11, 2018.

Operating points

Stopping point cow beer

Big Langerwisch stop

At Pritzwalk station , the line has its own head track in the western part of the station. Most stations are simple stops or stops with a siding. Apart from the Putlitz train station and the Suckow terminus, there are no major high-rise buildings, just simple waiting rooms. It is worth mentioning the shelter in Kuhbier . The Suckow terminus is now a residential building; of the intermediate stations on the disused section between Putlitz and Suckow, only the station building of Nettelbeck (which is the mirror image of the Dallminer building on the circular ring railway ) has been preserved.

The newly established Pritzwalk West stop only has a platform on the route to Putlitz, but not on the parallel route to Wittenberge in this section .

A curiosity was the temporarily served Putlitz Süd stop on a meadow south of Putlitz. It was set up for a weekend in 2004 to bring visitors to the VuuV Festival (formerly VooV Experience) to the event site. On the festival weekends at the beginning of August in the following years up to 2008, including the first two years after the scheduled traffic was canceled, special trains to transport festival guests also ran.

literature

• Dirk Endisch: Out of date . In: Die Kleinbahn, Volume 32 (2018), ISBN 978-3-947691-32-6 , pp. 2–32
• Ulrich Hoeppner, Erich Preuß : West and East Prignitzer Kreiskleinbahnen. In: Erich Preuß: Archives of German small and private railways: Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Berlin . transpress, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-344-70906-2 , pp. 98-109 .
• Peter Sommerfeld: The Perleberger Ringbahn. The regular gauge small railways Pritzwalk – Putlitz – Suckow, Perleberg – Karstädt – Berge – Perleberg and Berge – Putlitz . Dirk Endisch, Stendal 2012, ISBN 978-3-936893-67-0 .

Web links

Commons : Pritzwalk – Suckow railway line  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• The Prignitzer Kreiskleinbahnen on bahnstrecken.de
• Route description and track plan of the Putlitz station on eisenbahn-mv.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolf-Dietger Machel and Hans-Joachim Pohl, in: Verkehrsgeschichtliche Blätter , 2/99, p. 39
2. ↑ RegioInfra acquires Prignitzer Eisenbahn Infrastruktur GmbH (press release 05/2012). (PDF; 192 KB) RegioInfra GmbH, July 10, 2012, accessed on March 23, 2016 . 
3. ↑ Michael Beeskow: Rail traffic to Putlitz before the end - passenger transport will be discontinued in December / further timetable changes from August 6th . In: Märkische Allgemeine . Märkische Verlags- und Druck-Gesellschaft mbH, Potsdam August 1, 2012 ( online ( memento from January 6, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) [accessed on January 3, 2016]). Rail traffic to Putlitz before the end - Passenger transport will be discontinued in December / Further timetable changes from August 6th ( memento of the original from January 6th, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Further maintenance of the Putlitz - Pritzwalk route decided . In: Prignitz district (ed.): Press release . Perleberg November 9, 2012 ( online ( memento from January 5, 2016 in the web archive archive.today ) [accessed January 3, 2016]). Further maintenance of the Putlitz - Pritzwalk route decided ( memento of the original from January 5, 2016 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ http://www.hanseatische-eisenbahn.de/index.php/unternehmen/presse/pressemitteilungen/17-pms/44-pm-weiterbetrieb
6. ↑ Stefan Klein: Uerdinger nostalgia in the Prignitz . In: railway magazine . No. 2 , 2016, ISSN  0342-1902 , p. 47 .
7. ↑ Bahn-Report , 3/2016, p. 38.
8. ↑ Christian Schmettow: Another farewell to the Pritzwalk - Putlitz railway line: This time for the very-very-very-last time? maz-online.de, July 11, 2016, accessed on July 14, 2016 . 
9. ↑ Bahn-Report , 2/18, p. 38.