Goods tram

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CarGoTram in Dresden

A goods tram is a tram that is used to transport goods . With the establishment of trams in many inner cities, the question arose as to whether and how goods could be transported by rail vehicles in the inner city . In contrast to other freight railways, the inner-city development function of the tram can be used here. The transport of goods by tram can serve both supply and disposal. In the future, goods transport by tram will play a greater role for environmental reasons. The reasons for this are factors such as the fine dust problem and the inner city toll for trucks.

Internal transports

Historic flat car in Brno

Most tram networks only carry internal freight traffic . The transport of in particular is typical

The transport of goods in the tram sector is mostly carried out by means of simple flat wagons , more rarely with covered freight wagons . The towing vehicles used were usually special electric locomotives with a central driver's cab, in addition to ordinary passenger tram cars or work cars created from them . Box-shaped locomotives with two driver's cabs or freight railcars are rarer .

  • Salt mill car from Munich, with the help of these vehicles, road salt was ground on site and distributed over them to thaw the tracks

  • In-house freight transport in Berlin, 1990

  • Gravel transport in Vienna, 1979

  • Wiener Linien open rail car

Commercial transport

Specially adapted tram cars

Former freight railcar of the Hanover tram

Services for external companies are rarer than internal transports.

  • The largest tram transporter in Germany was the Hanover tram , which began transporting goods on October 1, 1899. In 1912 it transported 412,000 tons of goods on its network that extended far into the surrounding area, before Üstra gave up this branch of operation on December 1, 1953.
  • The Stuttgart trams set up a so-called market wagon traffic in 1912. He allowed the farmers and gardeners from the suburbs to transport their produce including handcarts on special flat wagons to the Stuttgart market hall in the city center. This service lasted until 1955.
  • Between 1926 and 1965, Bienertmühle Mehl's own vehicles were transported on the Dresden tram network ; there was a freight railcar and three freight trailers for this purpose. The freight trains connected the mill in the Plauen district with the Hafenmühle in Friedrichstadt , which belongs to the same company .
  • In the Ruhr area , freight trams were used to transport coal or other bulk goods during World War II . After the end of the war, rubble trains were often used on tram tracks in the destroyed cities to remove the rubble from the ruins.
  • The Thüringerwaldbahn transported in the years 1982 to 1988 crates of local brewery on their overland route from Gotha to Tabarz where the transhipment took place on trucks. For this service, the tram company used two older boxcars from 1929, which were originally used as baggage cars .
  • The CarGoTram has been operating in Dresden since the turn of the millennium with a one-year break . With two trainsets goods are for car production from a logistics center at the train yard Friedrichstadt in the Transparent Factory of Volkswagen in the Great Garden transported. The first vehicle was officially presented on November 16, 2000, and the CarGoTram completed its first test drives on January 3, 2001.
  • Likewise, the freight traffic was not realized with the Amsterdam tram . For this purpose, the use of freight trams was tested in March 2007 and it was decided to set up a freight road operation from 2008. Citycargo , the company commissioned with the operation, was to put ten freight trams into operation by the end of 2008. In the final stage there should be 50 railcars. Above all, these should take over the traffic of goods with the shops and restaurants in the inner city of Amsterdam and relieve them of delivery traffic with trucks. After the investors withdrew , Citycargo filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and this project has not been pursued since.

  • Former sidings of the Dresden Bienertmühle

  • Locomotive of Wuppertal Stadtwerke, today at the local railway Lambach-Vorchdorf-Eggenberg in use

  • Bulky waste transport by Cargotram in Zurich

  • A Güterbim test train in Vienna

  • Viennese tram wagons with characteristic all-round wooden cladding of the axles to avoid accidents in road traffic

Delivery of state rail freight cars via the tram network

A variant of the freight tram was the delivery of freight wagons of the state railway via the tram network, which in this case also functions as an industrial main track . Industrial companies off the railroad in particular benefited from this. In this way they still got a siding , at least if they were on or near a tram route. It was particularly advantageous that the goods were no longer reloaded onto road vehicles in the freight yard .

On the other hand, the sometimes time-consuming shunting operation had a disadvantageous effect , as it sometimes hindered the regular tram schedule and caused delays. Sometimes the freight trains had to use the opposite track on double-track lines against the normal direction of travel in order to serve certain connections. In Košice, for example, freight traffic was limited to the night hours due to the increase in passenger traffic in the last few years of its existence.

Direct car transfer

Especially in Austria-Hungary and its successor states, it was widespread to let the freight wagons run directly on the tram tracks, as long as the networks were normal-gauge . In the Austrian half of the empire this was the case in Brno (1909–1967), Ostrava (1894–1972) and St. Pölten (1911–2008). In the Hungarian half of the empire, all regular lane operators even had such freight traffic. These were: Arad at the time of the standard-gauge horse - drawn railway (1869–1929), Brașov (1890–1989), Budapest (1896–1996), Cluj-Napoca (1883–1902), Debrecen (from 1884), Košice (1913–1964) , Miskolc (from 1897), Oradea (1882–1994), Pécs (1914–1960), Timișoara (1899–1904 and 1916–1993) and Szeged (1884–1971). In Oradea, where at times up to 27 connections were served, freight transport was the pioneer of passenger transport, which was only introduced in 1896. In return, there was still goods traffic in Brașov (from 1960) and St. Pölten (from 1976), but no more passenger traffic. A special feature of the Arad operation was the double lane on the boulevard, with the western track exclusively used for passenger traffic and the eastern track exclusively for freight traffic.

In Germany, there was a direct transition from freight wagons to the Hanover tram , which it delivered to various companies on the route from Rethen to Pattensen and in the local area of Sehnde . So-called buck machines were used as towing vehicles . In Ukraine, the Kharkiv tram temporarily carried out freight traffic using rail freight cars.

However, the link between trams and railways often required infrastructural adjustments, particularly with regard to the tire profile . In St. Pölten, for example, the grooved rails were 60 millimeters wide on the mixed-use routes, but only 32 millimeters on the pure passenger traffic sections. Back in Hannover had tram vehicles were allowed to enter after Pattensen, wider tires and top flanges for the overrun frogs in the tram area. They were also identified by a triangle behind the car number.

In addition, the higher weight of the railway wagons had to be taken into account; it required heavier rails and a more stable substructure. Furthermore, the freight wagons were usually wider than the passenger wagons, which means that a larger track spacing had to be planned on double-track lines in order to avoid meeting bans. In addition, they could not drive particularly tight radii. On the vehicle side, the tram locomotives had to be equipped with buffers and screw couplings in addition to the central buffer couplings commonly used in trams .

In addition to the standard gauge networks, there were also narrow-gauge tram networks with direct wagon connections to railways in the same gauge. Examples of this are Gera, where the Gera-Pforten – Wuitz-Mumsdorf railway had a direct connection with the tram since it opened in 1901, the Satu Mare tram and the Sarajevo tram . In the Bosnian capital, the 760-millimeter-gauge Bosnabahn delivered its freight wagons to various companies in the urban area.

  • State railway freight cars parked in the center of Arad, delivery there was via the tracks of the horse-drawn tram

  • Ostrava: towing railcar with buffers and screw couplings for the transport of railway carriages

  • Electric freight locomotive from Miskolc in a rare design as box locomotive with a central driver's cab

Loading on trolleys or trolleys

Narrow-gauge tram networks, on the other hand, usually rely on loading standard-gauge wagons onto meter-gauge trolleys or trolleys . This was the case in Gera , Meißen , Mönchengladbach , Mulhouse , Reutlingen , Schaffhausen and Teplice , among others . However, Reutlingen and Teplice were at least initially licensed as small and local railways. The same applied to the former Haspe – Voerde – Breckerfeld railway, which was integrated into the network of Hagener Straßenbahn AG in 1931 and on which freight traffic took place until 1954. The Deuben freight railway, on the other hand, was used exclusively for freight traffic, but was licensed as a tram. In contrast, the Plettenberger tram was approved as a railway, but still operated similarly to a tram and at times served up to 71 connections.

Explosive vehicle

Historical explosive vehicle from the city of Biel from 1915

In the past, many municipalities also operated blasting vehicles to irrigate unpaved roads. They primarily served health care, but also made street cleaning easier afterwards.

Post trams

Post railcar from Frankfurt

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were also special post railcars with matching trailers for the exchange of mail between different post offices in the city in some cities in Europe . These include, for example, the Frankfurt am Main Post Tram from 1901 to 1951, the Munich Post Tram from 1905 to 1959, the Aachen Post Tram from 1920 to 1928, and the Berlin Post Tram from 1917 to 1935.

See also

literature

  • Horst Moch: Germany's largest tram freight transport Hanover 1899–1953 , Üstra, Hanover o. Year (1986), ISBN 3-9802783-2-8
  • Bernd Kortschak: A freight tram? For Vienna! , in: Gerhard Seicht (Ed.): Yearbook for Controlling and Accounting 2010 , LexisNexis, Vienna 2010, p. 599ff, ISBN 978-3-7007-4505-1 .
  • Martin Harák: Trams of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy . Tramway and trolleybus companies in Austria-Hungary. Verlag bahnmedien.at , Vienna 2015. ISBN 978-3-9503304-9-6 .
  • Wolfgang R. Reimann: Tram and freight traffic between Rhine, Ruhr and Wupper , Verlag B. Neddermeyer, Berlin 2004. ISBN 3-933254-45-0

Web links

Commons : Freight Trams  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ www.zieseniss.de
  2. ↑ 75 years of suburban trams, from Über Berg und Tal 3/1985
  3. ↑ Stuttgarter Nachrichten: Markthalle Stuttgart - One rail leads to nowhere
  4. ^ History of freight transport in Wuppertal at www.bahnen-wuppertal.de
  5. ↑ Bienertmühle siding on karsten.kerron.de
  6. ↑ www.thueringer-waldbahn.de
  7. ↑ Chronicle on www.waldbahn-gotha.de ( Memento from December 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ News update shortly . In: Eisenbahn-Revue International , issue 3/2001, ISSN  1421-2811 , p. 106.
  9. ↑ a b Tramvaje v Košicích on spvd.cz
  10. ^ History of public transport in Ostrava on www.dpo.cz
  11. ↑ a b c d Tram Atlas Romania 2004
  12. ↑ Trams & Tramways in Romania at www.beyondtheforest.com
  13. ↑ The Pécs tram 101 freight car on www.villamosok.hu
  14. ↑ www.szkt.hu ( Memento from March 25, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ Iparvágány térképe on tramclub.org
  16. ↑ transit.parovoz.com
  17. ↑ Chronicle of the St. Pölten tram at www.public-transport.at
  18. ↑ On the trail of the red 11 , documentation at www.eisenbahnfreunde-hannover.de
  19. ↑ 760net.heimat.eu
  20. ↑ The former Teplice tram on mhdteplice.cz
  21. ↑ Picture trip with the once most beautiful tram line in Germany on derwesten.de, article from November 17, 2011
  22. ↑ The Plettenberger Kleinbahn on www.alt-plettenberg.de