Neurath mine

Neurath mine
General information about the mine
other names	Initially the "Rheingold" mine , later Neurath opencast mine
Mining technology	Open pit
Information about the mining company
Start of operation	1907
End of operation	1961
Successor use	Reclamation
Funded raw materials
Degradation of	Brown coal
Geographical location
Coordinates	51 ° 1 '28.4 "  N , 6 ° 35' 52.7"  E Coordinates: 51 ° 1 '28.4 "  N , 6 ° 35' 52.7"  E
Location of the Neurath mine
Location	Neurath
local community	Grevenbroich
District ( NUTS3 )	Rhine district of Neuss
country	State of North Rhine-Westphalia
Country	Germany
District	Rhenish lignite district

The pit Neurath initially pit "Rheingold" and later, open pit Neurath called, is a former lignite - opencast mine south of town Neurath in Grevenbroich in the Rhenish lignite mining area .

history

prehistory

In 1858, when a well was being built in Neurath, lignite was struck by chance. As a result, several parties applied for concessions to mine the coal and, in 1861, the Königlich Rheinische Oberbergamt in Bonn identified three mine fields around Neurath: the "Neurath" field in the south-east, the "Happy Fall" field in the south-west and the field "Princess Victoria" in the northwest. The latter, named after the Prussian Crown Princess Victoria as patroness , was partly on the territory of the neighboring town of Frimmersdorf .

In the fields "Glücklicher Fall" and "Princess Victoria" the seam was initially unscored, only in the Neurath field an underground mine was excavated by entrepreneurs Clemens and Hansen , which was closed again in 1869. After that, mining in Neurath was suspended for almost 40 years.

From the pit "Rheingold" to open pit Neurath

At the end of the 19th century, the first larger pits in the southern Rhine area were opened using the opencast mining method, with which lignite could be extracted much more economically than using the civil engineering method. At the same time, the prices for lignite improved compared to hard coal from the Ruhr area. In Neurath, too, the brown coal reserves were remembered and it was decided to make a new attempt to extract and process the "brown gold" in open-cast mining. For this purpose a trade union called "Rheingold" was founded in 1905 , which acquired the concession for the Neurath field. In 1907, the company had a briquette factory built on the site of today's Neurath power plant and opened an open-cast mine south of it in the Neurath field. A pit connection railway to Oekoven was built from the briquette factory . In 1909 the "Rheingold" union was renamed the Neurath union ; with it, the briquette factory and mine also changed names.

In the same year, the Neurath union also acquired the concession for the "Princess Victoria" field and founded a union of this name as a subsidiary, which in turn had a second briquette factory built in 1911 (for example at the site of today's wave swimming pool in Neurath). The briquette factory "Princess Victoria" did not operate its own open-cast mine, but was also supplied from the Neurath mine . The "Princess Victoria" field remained unused.

In February 1921 the Michelwerke acquired the Neurath and Princess Victoria trade unions. Georg van Meeteren took over the chairmanship of the two mines in 1919.

The briquette factories were connected to the Neurath mine via a chain conveyor and belt systems . A conveyor bridge was also used at times to tilt the spoil . Mining proceeded clockwise from the exploration site, reached the northern edge of the later excavated town of Buchholz around 1935 and continued in a westerly direction, expanding to the area of ​​the former "Glücklicher Fall" field .

In 1952 the trade unions Neurath , "Princess Viktoria" , "Glücklicher Fall" and the "Union" , which had been founded in the meantime, merged to form the joint stock company Braunkohlenbergwerk Neurath , which in turn merged in 1959 into the Rheinische Braunkohlenwerke AG (Rheinbraun) .

Around 1960 the Neurath mine grew together with the Frimmersdorf mine to the west , which was also owned by the Rheinische lignite works . The pits were merged and opencast mining was continued in a westerly direction under the new name of Frimmersdorf-Süd , which later became the Garzweiler opencast mine .

The Neurath and "Princess Viktoria" briquette factories remained in operation until 1968, after which the coal mined went to various other briquette factories and lignite power stations in the Rhenish district, in particular the neighboring Frimmersdorf power station . After the Neurath briquette factory was demolished, a large power plant, the Neurath power plant, was also built here .

In the south, the Fortuna-Garsdorf opencast mine later grew to the limit of the Neurath opencast mine, which had been closed for a long time.

The Neurath opencast mine is now completely backfilled and recultivated . The area of ​​the pit is partly used as agricultural area, partly it is covered by the overburden dumps Neurather Höhe and Gürather Höhe .

Neurath-Nord opencast mine

In 1959, after the Neurath opencast mine had been charred , Martinswerk GmbH from Quadrath-Ichendorf acquired the concession for the "Princess Viktoria" and "Neurath III" fields north-west of Neurath, on the border with the neighboring town of Frimmersdorf . The Martinswerk opened a new opencast mine here, the Neurath-Nord opencast mine . Here the dismantling continued until 1985. The Neurath See emerged from the remaining hole in the Neurath-Nord opencast mine .

Web links

• www.peter-zenker.de - Various texts on the history of lignite mining in the northern Rhine area around Neurath and Frimmersdorf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 100 years of lignite mining in the northern district. (PDF) (No longer available online.) RWE, formerly in the original ; Retrieved December 6, 2010 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
2. ^ ^{A b c} Peter Zenker: Brown coal mining in Neurath - time table. (PDF; 61 kB) Accessed December 3, 2010 . 
3. ↑ Peter Zenker: Neurath. Mining, settlements, clubs. Pro Business Verlag, 2016, p. 122.
4. ↑ Peter Zenker: How Princess Viktoria came to Neurath. (PDF; 2.3 MB) Retrieved December 3, 2010 .