Osthofen – Westhofen railway line

Osthofen – Westhofen
Abutment of the second bridge over the Seebach
Route length:	6.1 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Legend 6.1 Westhofen (Rheinhessen) 4.1 Neumühle 2.6 Mühlheim (Rheinhessen) 2.4 Seebach (Rhine) 1.4 Lorchsmühle 0.9 Stone mill from Mainz 0.1 Altbach 0.1 Seebach (Rhine) 0.0 Osthofen to Ludwigshafen

The Osthofen – Westhofen railway , popularly known as Gickelche , was a single-track branch line , around six kilometers long, from Osthofen to Westhofen in Rheinhessen . The line was operated from 1888 to 1958.

history

Beginning

In 1880 the municipality of Westhofen requested the state to provide a railway connection. At that time, a cross-connection was planned that would connect to the west of the Worms – Bingen Stadt railway line . In 1884, the law on the construction of branch lines of the Grand Duchy of Hesse defined the connection between East and Westhofen as an "urgent need". A contract with the Hessian Ludwig Railway , the dominant railway company in the Grand Duchy at the time , for construction and operation did not come about. Rather, both were transferred to the Hermann Bachstein Railway Consortium , Berlin (from 1895: Süddeutsche Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft - SEG). According to the aforementioned law, the neighboring communities had to assume the costs of purchasing the land. After a long dispute between Westhofen and Osthofen about the route and costs, they agreed on a financing ratio of 88:12. The concession for the Bachstein consortium had a term of 50 years. Construction began in 1886 and the railway was originally due to open in the same year. Due to continued differences of opinion among those involved, completion was delayed for another two years: the construction of the railway was finished in the autumn of 1887, but did not go into operation due to some minor structural issues, the financing of which was again disputed between the municipalities and the railway. After several announcements and renewed postponement of the opening, the line finally went into operation on April 14, 1888. All attempts to extend the railway to the west, e.g. B. to Kirchheimbolanden , failed.

business

At the beginning of the operation wrong day six pairs of trains in passenger transport . The traffic developed more extensively than expected, so that the railway facilities in Westhofen had to be expanded. On the other hand, the company gave rise to numerous complaints because the vehicles used and the service quality left a lot to be desired. This led to the demand to nationalize the railway, which initially did not happen. On the basis of Article 95 of the Weimar Constitution , the law on the State Treaty on the Transfer of State Railways to the Reich of April 30, 1920, transferred railway supervision from the People's State of Hesse to the German Reich on August 1, 1922 , in fact from the Hessian Ministry of Finance to the Railway Directorate Mainz . In 1937 there were seven pairs of trains running on weekdays (there were four on Sundays), before passenger traffic was discontinued in 1953 there were four pairs of trains on weekdays and two on Sundays.

Freight customers were the furniture factory Ludwig force a siding possessed, as well as some country commercial companies . With the closure of the Lorsch mill in 1936, one of the biggest customers was lost.

statistics

year	traveler	Goods (t)	Locomotives	passenger cars	Pack wagons and freight cars	annotation
1928	118.282	22,948	2	3	1
1935	50.191	13,441	3	5	5
1938	60,919	17,108
1952	100,000	18,000	2	2	3

The End

From January 1953, the management of the SEG was transferred to the Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB), the railway infrastructure was taken over by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate on April 1, 1953 . The DB stopped passenger transport in April 1953 and, with the end of the sugar beet campaign on December 31, 1958, also freight transport. From May 1959, the track systems were dismantled and the site was mainly used for road construction. The station building and the railway area in Westhofen were used by the Raiffeisengenossenschaft .

Infrastructure

Historical

Bridge over the railway line to Judenhohl

The railway line was designed in standard gauge , single track and had no signal systems . The train protection took place in the train detection operation . All level crossings were level and unrestricted . The only exception was a bridge for a farm road which, at a point where the railway line ran in a cut in the terrain, led over the railway line to the Judenhohl.

Structural remains

Loading station of the stone mill

At the Osthofener Bahnhof you can still clearly see where the line began, thanks to the shape of an outbuilding for railway radio. The track was on the back of Platform 1, which was then somewhat wider at the time, and only a few meters further crossed the lake and shortly afterwards the Altbach.

Today there is a walking path between the exit towards Mettenheim and the Lorchsmühle. Over the first section between the Mettenheim exit and Ludwig-Schwamb-Straße, a bridge still preserved today leads a farm road from Ziegelhüttenweg to Judenhohl. In the 1950s, rascals brought the railway to a standstill from this bridge by throwing a large ball of snow into the chimney.

After crossing Ludwig-Schwamb-Straße, the route leads along the edge of the old town and forms the northern edge in the hilly part of Osthofen. In order not to have to run the railway further north over the elevations, it was partly built over the cellars of the adjoining houses, which were bricked up towards the railway. In the 1990s, the path collapsed over one of the cellars, whereupon it was filled. The loading station of the stone mill, which was served by a loading platform, is still visible today in a right-hand bend. The retaining walls made of natural stone a few meters further in the direction of Westhofen are worth seeing, which were supposed to stop the erosion of the loess soil during the construction of the route. Today the walls have to be saved from decay by local conservationists.

Lorchsmühle loading station as seen from Westhofen. Here the line was two-pronged.

A good 400 meters further on, the Lorchsmühle silo is visible from afar. The mill has a loading ramp along its entire length, along which a loading track used to run.

Little known are the old abutments of the second bridge over the Seebach just before the Mühlheim loading station. They are located on the north side in the undergrowth and are used as a parking space in a kitchen garden. There was also a loading platform in front of Mühlheim. In Westhofen that's reception building preserved, and serves as Raiffeisen gas station.

vehicles

The initial equipment of the SEG for the route consisted of two steam locomotives , tank locomotives from the Saxon machine factory (Bn2t), which were in use until 1926. There was also a 3rd class passenger car , a combined 2nd and 3rd class, and a mail and baggage car with 2nd and 3rd class compartments. From 1925 to 1927 a railcar was used for passenger transport . In 1952 there were two locomotives, two passenger cars, one pack car and three freight cars .

See also

• List of disused railway lines in Rhineland-Palatinate

literature

• Walter Borchmeyer: 40 years of the Süddeutsche Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft , Essen 1935 (reprint Darmstadt 1995)
• Georg Jakob Ertel: The Gickelche - The Westhofen Railway . Westhofen 2002. Without ISBN.
• Ralph Häussler: Railways in Worms . Hamm 2003. ISBN 3-935651-10-4
• Helga Lehr: Das Westhofener Gickelche , in: Alzey-Worms: Heimatjahrbuch- 39 (2004) , pp. 66–68
• Gerd Wolff: German small and private railways , Volume 1, Rhineland-Palatinate / Saarland, Freiburg 1989

Web links

• Information about the Gickelchen

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ertel, p. 3.
2. ↑ Ertel, p. 2.
3. ↑ Ertel, p. 8.
4. ↑ Ertel, p. 10.
5. ↑ Ertel, p. 14.
6. ↑ Ertel, p. 12f.
7. ↑ Häussler, p. 144; Ertel, p. 10.
8. ↑ Ertel, p. 25.
9. ↑ Ertel, p. 17.
10. ↑ Ertel, p. 18f.
11. ↑ RGBl. 1922, p. 773.
12. ^ Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz (ed.): Official Gazette of the Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz of August 19, 1922, No. 49. Announcement No. 919, p. 558.
13. ↑ Ertel, p. 21.
14. ↑ Ertel, p. 22.
15. ↑ Ertel, p. 15.
16. ↑ Ertel, p. 17.
17. ↑ Ertel, p. 21