Bonn-Cölner Railway Company
The Bonn-Cölner Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft , BCE for short , was a German railway company that was founded in Bonn in July 1837 and received the concession on July 6, 1840 to build and operate a railway line between Bonn and Cologne .
history
Track construction
Two variants were examined for the route: A direct connection that follows the course of the Rhine would have been cheaper. However, it led through sparsely populated areas from which no large number of passengers were expected. Half a century later, this line was built as the Rheinuferbahn by the Cologne-Bonn Railways .
The other, 29-kilometer-long variant was implemented, which later became part of the left-hand Rhine stretch . It led in a wide arc along the edge of the foothills via Roisdorf , Sechtem , Brühl and Kalscheuren to the Cologne St. Pantaleon train station . This terminus was reached immediately after passing through the Pantaleonstore of the medieval city wall .
The location of the Bonn train station was highly controversial . The location on Poppelsdorfer Allee was ultimately chosen because it was easier to extend the route south from there.
The first earthworks began in March 1842. The railway line was opened on February 15, 1844 after a large inauguration ceremony on February 13. From the summer of 1844, six pairs of trains ran daily; the first four locomotives came from Manchester .
Further construction to Rolandseck
In the same year, the BCE increased its capital to finance an extension of the route to Koblenz ; the shares were four times oversubscribed. The construction of the new line was delayed, among other things, because the University of Bonn protested to the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV against the division of the Poppelsdorfer Allee that it owned. The king finally commissioned the landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné to design the intersection.
On August 4, 1854, the BCE received approval to extend the route at least to Rolandseck . This was an important partial success, as there was the possibility there to allow passengers to transfer comfortably to steamboats and the station was also at the first bottleneck of the Middle Rhine Valley , which made it impossible to build competing routes on the left bank of the Rhine. On October 18, 1855, the train service via Bad Godesberg and Mehlem to Rolandswerth began, and the entire 14-kilometer extension to Rolandseck was put into operation on January 21, 1856.
Dissolution of the company
On January 1, 1857, the Bonn- Cölner Eisenbahn was taken over by the Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft at a price of 1.05 million talers.
Forty years later, the Köln-Bonner Eisenbahnen (KBE), a railway company with a similar name, was established, but had no direct relationship with BCE.
See also
literature
- Emil Bürger, Germany's Railways in 1845 , Karlsruhe 1845, pp. 40–42 ( Google Book Search )
- Reinhard Schmoeckel , Klaus Kemp: 150 years of the railways in Bonn. City of Bonn, Bonn 1994, ISBN 3-922832-11-3 .
- Reinhard Schmoeckel: The steam horse - historical factual novel about the construction of the first railway Bonn - Cologne . Bastei Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2000, ISBN 3-404-14459-7
- Expert opinion on the layout of the Bonn train station for the Bonn-Cölner Eisenbahn / Maertens, district builder. - Bonn, Georgi, 1842. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
- Expert opinion on the layout of the train station in Bonn, for the Bonn-Cologne railway: along with detailed lighting of the expert opinion by the district builder Märtens in Braunschweig on the same layout; at the instigation of the residents of Bonn . - Bonn, 1842. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf