Deutz – Gießen railway line
With the Deutz – Gießen railway line , a connection was created between Deutz in the Rhineland and Gießen in the Rhine-Main area from the end of the 1850s . The route still exists, but today traffic is generally no longer routed continuously along the historic route. You can find details here
- in the northern part around the victory route from (Cologne-) Deutz – Betzdorf – Siegen,
- the abbreviation used today on the Betzdorf – Haiger line and
- the southern part of the historical route around the Dill route (Siegen–) Haiger – Gießen.
Interests
Prussia had an interest in connecting the coal deposits in the Ruhr area and the steelworks in the Rhineland with the iron ore deposits in Sieg , Heller , Dill and Lahn by a railway. Furthermore, Prussia had an exclave with the city of Wetzlar and its surrounding area , which had to be better connected to the heartland. Problems arose from the fact that the planned route in the area of today's Lahn-Dill district should lead through the then independent Duchy of Nassau . The duchy made the concession required for its territory dependent on Prussia approving the further construction of the railway line on the right bank of the Rhine , which belonged to the Nassau State Railway , from Lahnstein to Cologne. Prussia finally undertook to connect the Nassau Rhine route between Niederlahnstein and Koblenz to the left Rhine route with a bridge . Nassau then granted the concession required for its national territory in 1860 , which enabled the construction of the victory route through its national territory. In Gießen, the Deutz-Gießener Railway joined the Main-Weser Railway .
Railway construction
The Cöln-Mindener Eisenbahn (CME) expressed its interest in building the line from Deutz (today: Cologne-Deutz ) to Gießen and received the concessions for it. Construction began from Deutz following the existing CME line Deutz – Minden with a branch over the Rhine bridge completed in 1859 to Cologne. At the same time, the Deutzerfeld marshalling and storage yard with the facilities, workshops and buildings required for operation was created, through which a direct connection to the Ruhr area was created. The route was not easy due to the topography . Between Siegburg and Betzdorf , the route in the Sieg valley, which flows there in tight loops, had to be led over numerous bridges and through many tunnels. To the east from Betzdorf to Dillenburg , a low mountain range threshold had to be overcome, including a hairpin bend in order to limit the longitudinal slope of the route to the comparatively low value of 1.5%. The construction of the line cost 26.5 million talers . The construction costs were thus 1,088,226 thalers per Prussian mile . The cost of the Cologne-Mindener Railway was only 782,611 thalers per mile.
On January 1, 1859, the first section to Hennef was opened. The 183 km long route from Cologne to Gießen was finally opened on January 12, 1862 (the cathedral bridge in Cologne was completed in 1859). Soon afterwards the name Cologne-Gießener-Eisenbahn was used.
The branch line from Betzdorf to Siegen was also part of the route . The Betzdorf - Siegen railway was put into operation on January 10, 1861, after the first locomotive from Betzdorf had already arrived in Siegen on December 28, 1860.
Up to 1865, four passenger trains between (Cologne-) Deutz and Siegen were reported, which required 4 hours and 11 minutes travel time in each direction. An express train that only stopped at the stations, but not at the stops, took 2 hours and 38 minutes to cover the same distance.
expansion
By 1870, the line was completely double-tracked. Many bridges were destroyed in the victory flood in 1909 , including railway bridges such as those in Herchen .
A major operational problem was that at the time the line was built, a direct connection between Siegen and Dillenburg was not yet possible. In between was the Tiefenrother Höhe (551 m). The construction of long tunnels was still immensely time-consuming and expensive in 1860, because dynamite was not yet available. Siegen was connected to the Ruhr area from the north by the Bergisch-Märkische Eisenbahn . Trains that were supposed to go further south - and that included the coal trains - first had to go west to Betzdorf, “head” there and then go east again towards Dillenburg.
This problem was resolved in 1915 when the direct line between Siegen and Haiger was put into operation. The connection between Siegen and Dillenburg was shortened by about 30 km. This was made possible by three large engineering structures: the Niederdielfen Viaduct , the Rudersdorfer Viaduct and, above all, the Rudersdorfer Tunnel .
consequence
With this shortening of the route, the traffic shifted and now usually led via Siegen and Haiger. The topographically unfavorable section of the historical route between Betzdorf and Haiger lost its importance. The route still exists, but is now only served by local transport. Most of it has been dismantled on a track since 1980 and was threatened with closure in the 1990s . The consequence of this shortening route extension is that the former Deutz-Gießener Railway is now operationally divided into three clearly separate sections. Even today, however, the continuous kilometrage of all three routes from Cologne-Deutz is reminiscent of the old route.
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- Cologne-Deutz - Betzdorf, kilometering from Cologne-Deutz to Betzdorf, on to Gießen (VzG route 2651)
- Betzdorf - Siegen, kilometrage from Hagen via Siegen-Weidenau to Betzdorf (VzG route 2800 or 2880)
Betzdorf – Haiger railway line
- Betzdorf - Haiger, kilometrage from Cologne-Deutz via Betzdorf and Burbach (Kr.Siegen) to Haiger (VzG route 2651)
- Siegen-Ost - Haiger, kilometering from Hagen via Siegen-Weidenau to Haiger (VzG route 2800)
- Haiger - Gießen, kilometrage from Cologne-Deutz and Betzdorf via Haiger and Herborn to Gießen (VzG route 2651)
literature
- Bernd Franco Hoffmann: The Cologne-Mindener Railway: Railways through the Rhineland and Ruhr area. Sutton-Verlag, Erfurt 2018, ISBN 3-9540-0972-2 .
- Deutsche Reichsbahn: The German Railways in their Development 1835–1935 . Berlin 1935.
- Railway in Hessen. Cultural monuments in Hessen. Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany . Ed .: State Office for Monument Preservation Hessen . Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 2005. Vol. 2.1, p. 264 ff. And Vol. 2.2, p. 1011 ff., ISBN 3-8062-1917-6
- Railway Atlas Germany (Edition 2009/2010). Eupen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89494-139-0
- Karl-Peter Ellerbrock, Marina Schuster (Ed.): 150 Years of Cologne – Minden Railway. Catalog for the series of exhibitions and events of the same name. Klartext, Essen 1997, ISBN 3-88474-560-3
- Wolfgang Klee, Günther Scheingraber: Prussian Railway History , Part 1: 1838–1870 . In: Prussia Report Volume No. 1.1 . Merker, Fürstenfeldbruck 1992, ISBN 3-922404-35-9 .
- Wenzel Merzhäuser: Railways in the Westerwald . Eisenbahn-Kurier-Verlag, Freiburg 1996, ISBN 3-88255-579-3
- Klaus Strack: 150 years of the railway in the Siegtal . Nümbrecht 2010, ISBN 978-3-89909-100-7
Individual evidence
- ↑ Scheiner, construction facilities of the Cologne-Gießener railway and the branch line from Betzdorf to Siegen, Nachdr.d. Edition 1865 Siegburg Rheinlandia, p. 3, Special description of the line
- ↑ Scheiner, construction facilities of the Cologne-Gießener railway and the branch line from Betzdorf to Siegen, Nachdr.d. Issued in 1865 Siegburg Rheinlandia
- ↑ Strack, p. 13.
- ^ Siegerländer Heimatkalender from 1969, "Milestones from the Siegerland Past" by Adolf Müller, p. 112, Verlag für Heimatliteratur
- ↑ Historical: When the smallpox epidemic prevailed in Wisserland, on ak-kurier.de on June 9, 2020, accessed on June 10, 2020