Röthenbach – Weiler railway line

Röthenbach (Allgäu) –Weiler (Allgäu)
Route number (DB) :	5431
Course book range :	last 406 h
Route length:	5.73 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Legend from Lindau from Scheidegg 0.00 Röthenbach (Allgäu) 705 m to Buchloe 0.53 District road LI 3 (corrugated iron tunnel) Rentershofen embankment 0.93 Instead of the Allgäu gravel and gravel works 3.00 Bundesstrasse 308 3.15 Auers (formerly: Ellhofen) 650 m Loading track (1901 to 1960) 3.20 Rothach 4.00 Rothach 5.50 Instead of Rudolph Steinwerke 5.73 Hamlet (Allgäu) 632 m

The Röthenbach-Weiler railway was a branch line in Bavaria . It branched off the Buchloe – Lindau railway line in Röthenbach and led via Ellhofen to Weiler im Allgäu .

history

Opening ceremony in Weiler in 1893

At the time of the dawn of industry and trade, the market hamlet in the Allgäu tried to use the improved transport options by rail for local production and in the 1870s submitted several - albeit unsuccessful - applications to the Bavarian state government to build the line. Then the Weiler im Allgäu market and private shareholders resorted to self-help and secured the financing. Finally, in 1891, Munich approved the construction of a vicinal railway and had the construction work carried out by the Royal Bavarian State Railways . The Weiler (Allgäu) station was built at the northern end of what was then the town and operations on the municipality's own local railway opened on July 22, 1893.

Weiler train station in June 2018

The municipality sold the railway line to the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1920 because of the deteriorating economic development . Traffic was always low; in 1944, for example, only four pairs of trains ran daily, some of them as freight trains with passenger transport .

Weiler train station in July 2007

Cycle path on the former railway line at the underpass of the federal highway 308 at route kilometer 3.0

The German Federal Railroad finally stopped passenger traffic on December 1, 1960 and freight traffic, which was very weak, on April 25, 1991. In 1987 , the local freight trains , which were called handover at the time, only ran three to four times a month. The bridge of the district road LI 3 was replaced by a corrugated iron tunnel, this took place in 1979. Due to the commitment of a local hard stone works to transport larger amounts of transport by rail in the future, the superstructure was completely renewed for two million D-Marks in the early 1980s. Shortly thereafter, however, production was largely relocated, so that rail transports fell again considerably. In 1995 the dismantling of the facilities began. Finally, the route was paved and made available to the public as a cycling and hiking trail . The station building with goods hall in Weiler (Allgäu) as well as some remains of track still exist. In 2016, 25 years after the final closure of the railway line, the former is in a poor structural condition. The goods hall has meanwhile been torn down and a sign announces the construction of a company's production hall for the derelict former railway site.

literature

• Urs Kramer , Matthias Brodkorb: Farewell to the rails. Freight routes 1980 to 1993 . Transpress, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-613-71346-8 , pp. 145 .
• Georg Wagner, Gerd Zimmer: Heimatbuch Weiler im Allgäu. Verlag Buchdruckerei Holzer, Weiler im Allgäu 1994. Publisher: Markt Weiler-Simmerberg (on the occasion of the 1100th anniversary of the first documentary mention).

Web links

Commons : Röthenbach – Weiler railway line  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Today's route status on www.vergessene-bahnen.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Markus Hehl: The steam locomotive era in Swabia. Klartext Verlag, Essen, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8375-0613-6 , page 61.
2. ↑ see Georg Wagner, Gerd Zimmer: Heimatbuch Weiler im Allgäu.
3. ↑ Alteneder, W., Schüssler, C .: The branch lines of the BD Munich , Bonn 1987, p. 138
4. ↑ ibid.