Göttingen small train
Gartetalbahn: stations and artificial structures |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Course book section (DB) : | 202e (1956); 202c | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Route length: | 35.6 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gauge : | 750 mm ( narrow gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Gartetalbahn or Göttinger Kleinbahn AG was a narrow-gauge railway that ran from Göttingen to Rittmarshausen from 1897 to 1957 and on to Duderstadt from 1907 to 1931 .
Origin and history
Gartetalbahn AG was founded as Göttinger Kleinbahn AG on November 16, 1896. The district and the city of Göttingen, the municipality of Rittmarshausen and the railway construction and operating company Lenz & Co GmbH , which also ran the company until 1938, were involved. Subsequently, operations management was at the Lower Saxony State Railway Authority in Hanover.
On December 19, 1897, the company opened a small railway with a gauge of 750 mm, which led from Göttingen in the valley of the Garte , a tributary of the Leine, up to Rittmarshausen. The operating center was always located there. Ten years later, on July 1, 1907, the railway was even extended to the district town of the neighboring district of Duderstadt , which had already been connected to the state railway network in 1889.
In Göttingen, the Gartetalbahn passenger trains ended directly in front of the Göttingen state railway station building. When the railway facilities in Göttingen were raised in the 1920s due to increasing road traffic, the passenger station of the Gartetalbahn had to be relocated back about 400 m to the south-southwest behind the underpass of the Groner Landstrasse. In the Göttingen-Süd station of the Gartetalbahn, there was a reloading facility between the narrow-gauge railway and the state railway until the end.
The Duderstadt – Rittmarshausen section of the 36 km long route was shut down again after just 15 years from April 1922 - due to insufficient demand. The resumption of traffic on a limited scale was only temporary; the end came irrevocably in 1931. On the other hand, passenger traffic from Göttingen to Rittmarshausen lasted for almost sixty years, until October 30, 1957; Freight trains - mainly for transporting sugar beets - even ran until March 1, 1959. After that, the route was canceled.
After the retirement of the AG for Transport , which had taken the place of Lenz & Co, after the Second World War 75% of the shares were in the hands of the State of Lower Saxony, 22% in private hands. The company has been called Gartetalbahn AG since 1946 and was owned by the district of Göttingen from 1957, which operated a bus line along the former railway line until 1983.
vehicles
When operations began, there were three two-axle steam locomotives (No. 1 to 3), and two four-axle Mallet locomotives were added in the next few years (No. 11 and 12). In 1940 a three-axle locomotive with a trailing axle was procured to replace the missing locomotive 3; after the war, two three-axle locomotives with tender (No. 4 and 5) for the other two-couplers from the army field railroad and a five-axle tender locomotive (No. 12 II ) came as well from the Heeresfeldbahn, as a replacement for the mallets.
In 1954 the Kleinbahn Steinhelle – Medebach procured a four-axle railcar, which was built in 1939 by the Wismar wagon factory .
There were never more than nine four-axle and three two-axle passenger cars, plus two baggage / mail cars and up to 24 boxcars and 53 gondolas.
The route today
The course is stored in OpenStreetmap and is also shown by default in OpenRailwaymap.
In many places there are still traces of the old route in the landscape. Some examples are:
- Noticeably long, narrow section of the DLR site on Brauweg.
- Bridge foundations on the Leine Canal in the area of Jahnstrasse
- Level in the area that leads to the sports hall of the Felix-Klein-Gymnasium
- Triangular section of property at the confluence of the Windausweg into Lotzestrasse
- southern extension of Lotzestrasse, next to which the embankment is clearly visible, separated from the path by a ditch
- Railway embankments in the Gartetal between Gartemühle and Diemarden, between Rittmarshausen and Kerstlingerode
- Plateau of the former Kerstlingerode train station, today the location of the Gartetal School.
- Foundations of the bridge over the garden at Wöllmarshausen (the bridge itself was demolished when the railway was closed and rebuilt in 2006 as part of the construction of the cycle path).
- The goods shed at the former Klein Lengden train station on the road between Klein Lengden and Diemarden is a replica from around 2006. The almost identical original shed that stood in the same place was demolished in the same year.
- The goods shed at the former Steinsmühle train station, however, is still in its original state.
- Railway station on Landstrasse in Rittmarshausen, today used as a residential building.
- Locomotive shed in Rittmarshausen, is used commercially today.
- Remains of the Rittmarshausen – Duderstadt section, which was finally closed in 1931, can still be seen today, such as the abutments of bridges and the remains of dams and cuttings that make the former route recognizable.
Today, part of the route is part of the Lower Saxony long-distance cycle path network, here the Weser-Harz-Heide-Radfernweg (Lower Saxony long- distance cycle path / RFW 5), which leads from the Lüneburg Heath over the Harz and the Rhume spring via Göttingen to the Weser . In addition, some street names such as Am Gartetalbahnhof in Göttingen and Am Bahnhof in Rittmarshausen are reminiscent of the railway line.
Literature and film material
- Karl Burmester: Göttinger Kleinbahn AG - Chronicle of the Gartetalbahn, 1897–1957: 60 years of small railway history. Verlag Göttinger Tageblatt, Göttingen 1987, ISBN 3-924781-14-1 .
- DVD Gartetalbahn. Edited by Institut f. scientific film (IWF) gGmbH, Z12900.
- Gerd Wolff: German small and private railways. Volume 11: Lower Saxony 3 . Eisenbahn-Kurier, Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-88255-670-4 , p. 190-206 .
Web links
- official homepage of Duderstadt with an article about the Gartetalbahn
- The Gartetalbahn in and around Rittmarshausen on rittmarshausen.de
- At the Gartetalbahnhof - interesting facts about a Göttinger Straße
- Track inspection in 2006 by Reiner Schruft
- the Gartetalbahn - history and information
- Film on Youtube: "A ride on the Göttingen Kleinbahn 1941" (3:59)
- Video: Gartetalbahn . Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) 2005, made available by the Technical Information Library (TIB), doi : 10.3203 / IWF / A-12901 .
- Early documents and newspaper articles on the Göttingen Kleinbahn in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kilometrage according to Burmeister: Göttinger Kleinbahn; Wolff is different
- ↑ Relation: Gartetalbahn (5145002) OpenStreetmap, accessed on July 3, 2018.
- ↑ Reiner Schruft: Rittmarshausen - Duderstadt. Retrieved October 6, 2018 .