Friederiken railway line
Coordinates: 49 ° 15 '37.9 ″ N , 6 ° 54 ′ 17.2 ″ E The Friederiken rail route was a 2.5 km long, initially wooden, then cast iron rail route in the Frommersbachtal near Altenkessel in Saarland , which connected the two coal mines Bauernwald and Großwald (combined to form the Luisenthal mine ) connected to the Luisenthal loading pointon the Saar. The route ran along today's Josefaschacht and Altenkesseler Strasse in Saarbrücken and Völklingen . A steam car from the Royal Iron Foundry in Berlin was supposed to travel the route in 1819. If the locomotive had worked, it would have been the first rail connection on the continent, 16 years before the Nuremberg - Fürth rail connection . The wagons were moved by people and later by horses until the first locomotive ran the route in 1862.
During the first general inspection of the newly acquired pits of the Saar district in July 1816, the Prussian chief miner Johann Carl Ludewig Gerhard , who was open to all innovations, commented on the Großwald mine near Altenkessel: “No mine will better qualify for horse production than Großwald, because of its size and the Regularity of the seam, and because of the expanse of the building, but the wagon promotion becomes even more important if one combines it with a promotion on railways to the Saar, and on this way, which is p [ro] pt [er] 900 Lachter long, the wagons are moved by a fire engine. ”In August 1816, the chief miner considered“ the construction of an iron railroad ”. The fire engine was to be manufactured in Berlin and delivered from there to the Saar by water and land. In the autumn of 1817, construction began on the Friederiken rail line, which connected the Bauernwald mine near Altenkessel with the Luisenthal loading station on the Saar. In August / September 1818, the railroad was first provided with wooden rails, and from 1821 with cast-iron rails manufactured at the Geislautern ironworks . The steam car of the Königliche Eisengießerei Berlin was completed on July 29, 1818 and arrived in Geislautern in February 1819 dismantled for transport , but after being dismantled in Berlin it could no longer be rebuilt into a functioning, ready-to-drive steam car. “The first railway on the continent therefore did not run on the Saar.” Rather, the Friederiken railway was initially operated with horses and only in 1862 with a small locomotive.
literature
- Hermann Joseph Becker: Through two millennia of traffic history in the Saarland. Saarbrücken 1933, p. 296.
- Kurt Hoppstädter : The origin of the Saarland railways. Saarbrücken 1961, p. 19ff.
- Michael Sander (arrangement): Arrival at Saarbrücken Hbf…: 150 years of the railway on the Saar. Saarbrücken 2002, p. 62.
Web links
- Construction of the railway line from the Bauernwald and Großwald coal mines to the Saar
- Creation of the railway network in Saarland