Forster city railway

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Forster city railway
Route length: 24 km
Gauge : 1000 and 1435 mm
Minimum radius : 15 m
Top speed: 8 km / h

The Forster Stadteisenbahn , also called Forster Stadtbahn for short , was a meter- gauge small railway in the city of Forst (Lausitz) , which served as an industrial connecting railway to serve industrial companies. It was in operation from 1893 to 1965. Popularly it was also called Jule or Black Jule .

history

Jacked up freight car in the Forster Textile Museum

The town of Forst had become a center of the textile industry in the 19th century. Numerous cloth factories were located in the city. Supplying factories with raw materials, especially coal, became a problem. Transport by horse-drawn carts was cumbersome and expensive. Since 1890 there have been plans to build an inner-city connecting railway.

The Lokalbahn AG (LAG) in Munich submitted to magistrate the offer of a meter-gauge track on the standard gauge - freight cars with dollies should be promoted. On July 28, 1892, the LAG received the concession document . The company was opened on May 8, 1893. The railway was built and licensed as a small railway similar to that of a branch line .

In the first full year of operation, 120,400 tons of goods were transported. In 1914 it was 220,760 tons. On January 1, 1920, the railway became the property of the city, as it was planning the installation of an electric tram .

The railway was not nationalized after 1945, but remained a municipal operation. Together with the Strausberg Railway and the Spremberger Stadtbahn , it was one of only three regionally active railway companies in the GDR that were not taken over by the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn after the Second World War . The supervision of these railways - as well as for trams and other public transport railways such as pioneer railways - was carried out by the district railway supervision assigned to the respective councils of the districts , economics department.

The destruction of the city made many sidings superfluous, but in 1959 223,000 tons of goods were still transported. In the 1960s, the railway was seen as a traffic obstacle to increasing motor traffic, and trucks had become more readily available as an alternative. After the city council had decided to shut it down, the last train passed through the city on August 31, 1965. As of December 31, operations were also formally shut down .

Investments

Former affiliation of the Daniel Noack cloth factory

The center of operations was the so-called city ​​station , where three trolley pits were available. This was located north of the Forster State Railway Station , the two stations were connected by a standard-gauge track of the city railway. The track systems in the city consisted mainly of grooved rails and were laid out in a ring, so that the operation of the numerous track connections was mainly carried out in round trips. In addition to a large ring, there were also three smaller rings through additional connecting tracks. There were six evasion or Umsetzstellen, in less-traveled roads, as well as four track triangles .

When it opened, the track network comprised 17.155 km and 59 sidings, in 1934 it was 24 km and 98 connections. The smallest arches had a radius of 15 m. A weight of nine tons was permitted as the axle driving mass.

business

With its own standard gauge locomotives, the city railroad picked up the wagons from the Forst (Lausitz) station on the Cottbus railway line and loaded them onto trolleys at the city station. Up to four, and later also five standard-gauge wagons could be transported in one train. The roller stands were coupled with bars, there was no through brake; therefore the maximum speed was only eight kilometers per hour. The ring-shaped track system allowed several trains to run at the same time. All trips were made as required, there was no timetable. The cars were pushed backwards into the connections. The trains were also pushed to enter the city station.

vehicles

Locomotive number 36 preserved in a museum

When it opened, there were two standard gauge locomotives and six narrow-gauge locomotives. The standard gauge locomotives (LAG 30 and 31) had been taken over by other railways of the company, they were later exchanged for other locomotives (LAG 38, LAG 6 ). Finally, the town of Forst bought a locomotive that was not given a number. The narrow-gauge locomotives (LAG 32 to 37) were manufactured by the Krauss locomotive factory in 1893 and were designed as box locomotives .

Between 1922 and 1925, three more narrow-gauge locomotives with the numbers 1 to 3 were procured from the same manufacturer. From the initial 48 roller stands, the number grew to 128 roller stands by 1927; there were also ten open and five covered freight cars.

Locomotive 36 was taken over by the Dresden Transport Museum after it was discontinued and brought back to Forst in 2012. A presentation is planned in the Brandenburg Textile Museum in Forst, where an extension will be built. The museum building is a former cloth factory that had a siding. Two roller stands from the Ottensen industrial railway were acquired as additional exhibits.

Monument protection

Marking of the track position in Gubener Straße, 2013

The depot and the track systems in the Forster city area are under monument protection. The remaining tracks, which are still in the old pavement, are often interrupted and asphalt was partly poured into the grooves. When the lane was renewed on Gubener Strasse in 2012, the tracks were removed in coordination with the monument authority and the former location of the light rail tracks was permanently marked by stone markings in the asphalt.

literature

  • Klaus Jünemann, Erich Preuß : Narrow-gauge railways between the Spree and Neisse . Transpress VEB Verlag for Transport, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-344-00307-0 .
  • Guido Wranik: Right through the forest. 125 years of the Forster city railway . Eisenbahnkurier 5/2018, pp. 48–53.

Web links

Commons : Forster Stadteisenbahn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ www.stilllege.de
  2. ↑ Memorial planned for Forster city railway. In: The Museum Railway . No. 3 , 2017, ISSN  0936-4609 .
  3. ↑ Entry in the monument database of the State of Brandenburg