Hanauer Kleinbahn

Hanauer Kleinbahn
Route length:	14.9 / 10.2 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Maximum slope :	Adhesion 15  ‰ rack  ‰
Hanau – Hüttengesäß / Langenselbold
Legend to Hanau North 0.0 Hanau (small train station) 1.1 Three- rail track of the railway troops 600 mm / 1435 mm 1.4 Neuhof 4.9 Soft backs Rückingen West before 1923 5.7 Rückingen West after 1923 5.9 Rückingen place Siding Mühlenwerke Schönmeyer 10.0 Black hole 10.3 Gründau 10.4 Langenselbold small train station narrow-gauge connection Glue factory Steinhäuser and Petri 5.9 Rückingen East 6.3 Fallbach 6.4 Langendiebach 6.5 Connection of the cigar box factory Brüning und Sohn AG 6.6 Fallbach 8.7 Ravolzhausen 9.2 Connection to the Heinrich Müller & Will brickworks 10.8 Schafbach 11.0 Schafbach 11.8 Bruderdiebacher Hof 13.6 Fallbach 15.1 Buttocks

The Hanauer Kleinbahn connected 1896 to 1933, the city of Hanau with surrounding municipalities and the two end points Hüttengesäß and Langenselbold in standard gauge .

stretch

Remaining route: Crossing Karl-Marx-Strasse in Hanau

Hanau small train station

The Hanau small train station was east of the tracks of the Hanau Nord train station and the Friedberg – Hanau state railway line , to which there was a connecting track. The original project of running the small train to Neustädter Markt in Hanau or even to the Hanau West train station was not implemented - although the permit for the level crossing of the Friedberg – Hanau railway line was in place.

The Hanau Kleinbahnhof was initially simply called Hanau , from 1926 Hanau-Kleinbahnof . One photo shows the lettering Hanau Lokalbahnhof and in correspondence it is also referred to as Hanau Nord Kleinbahnhof .

Starting from here, the route first crossed the area of ​​today's Hanau suburb of Tümpelgarten and the Lamboywald , in order to then follow the existing road into the Kinzig valley, Leipziger Straße . Here the two branches of the route separated at km 4.9 ("Weiche Rückingen"):

Hanau – Langenselbold railway line

Train stations

• Rückingen West was a stopping point and a necessary stop . In 1923 it was moved a little further into town from its original position. He had no structural facilities other than the track itself.
• Rückingen Ort had only one stump track in addition to the main track. There was an unheated wooden hut as a waiting room. The station was not manned. The neighboring inn owned by the widow Dietz sold tickets . A few hundred yards away was the since 1917 siding for Mühlenwerke Schönmeyer . The wagons were stopped here by clipping , which was forbidden, but was not abandoned until after an accident on April 21, 1921, when a group of wagons ran over the buffer stop without braking and destroyed it.
• The train station in Langenselbold was simply called Langenselbold . It had a main track, a bypass track and a stub track with a single locomotive shed at the end. The station building had an attached goods shed .

The "Bahnhofstraße" in Langenselbold still reminds of the location of the small train station.

The town of Langenselbold also had a state train station on the Kinzig Valley Railway . Since 1904 the terminus of the Freigerichter Kleinbahn was located there . However, this station was 2.5 km from the city center and 2 km from the Hanauer Kleinbahn station in Langenselbold, on the other side of the Kinzig , and no longer accessible from the village during floods - which came at least every spring.

→ Main article : Langenselbold train station

Hanau – Hüttengesäß railway line

Between Rückingen Weiche and Langendiebach the route ran on its own dam, the town was driven through on the street, the rest of the way on the Langendiebach– Ravolzhausen street .

Train stations

• Rückingen East ; a breakpoint
• Langendiebach station was on the southern outskirts. The long-time station master acquired the reception building from the liquidation assets and ran an inn there. It was demolished in 2016.
• The Ravolzhausen train station was in what is now Fallbachstrasse . It was not staffed.
• The Bruderdiebacher Hof train station was next to the homestead of the same name.
• The Hüttengesäß train station was built south of the village so that it was easily accessible for the residents of Neuwiedermuß and there would have been the possibility of extending the train to there. The station building and the engine shed are the last high-rise buildings of the Hanauer Kleinbahn.

A branch to Marköbel was planned from the route, but it was never built.

history

Beginning

The Hanauer Kleinbahn owes its existence to an initiative to develop the rural area of ​​the southern Wetterau east and northeast of Hanau.

Approval for the construction was granted on March 9, 1896 to Hermann Christner , Hanau, according to the Prussian Small Railroad Act . The construction costs were around 20,000 marks / km. The commissioning took place on October 1st, 1896. Extending the railway beyond Hüttengesäß was considered in 1897. The project to do it via Altwiedermus and Büdingen to Wolferborn or Rinderbügen failed because it would have been "cross-border" (from Prussia to the Grand Duchy of Hesse ) and the Hessian side showed no interest. The railway entrepreneur, Hermann Christner, also turned to a new project during this time, the Kahlgrundbahn .

At the beginning, six pairs of trains ran on the branch to Langenselbold every day, and four on the branch to Hüttengesäß. The passenger trains ran in 2nd and 3rd class , had non-smoking compartments and, from 1899, also wagons - at least some of which were only allowed to be used by women . The majority of the passengers used time cards for third-class worker traffic.

Hermann Christner, initially the sole owner of the railway, converted it into a stock corporation on June 18, 1897 , the Hanauer Kleinbahn-Gesellschaft AG . In 1899 Hermann Christner sold the majority of his shares to the Berlin- based United Railway Construction and Operating Company . From 1897 to 1934 the seat of the Hanauer Kleinbahn-Gesellschaft AG was then also in Berlin, then again in Hanau.

business

The maximum speed on its own route was 30 km / h (technically it was designed for 35 km / h), on routes that were laid in the street space, 20 km / h, in the through-town of Langendiebach even only 10 km / h. The freight traffic was carried out by mixed trains (PmG). Only shortly before the First World War , after the freight volume had increased, pure freight trains were also run, as well as after 1931. In freight traffic, wagonloads ran continuously to and from the state railway.

Shortly after commissioning, complaints about the quality of the service offered increased. These deficiencies were caused by the light superstructure (limitation to 12 tons axle load ) and the fact that mainly used rolling stock was used. There was also considerable harassment of women in overcrowded workers' trains; the trains were often soiled.

particularities

A special feature of the operation was that the vehicles, which only traveled on the small train, had a central buffer coupling . However, since freight wagons from the general traffic of the Prussian State Railways and later the Deutsche Reichsbahn with the pushing and pulling devices customary there were transferred to the small railroad, there must have been a technical possibility - which is unknown today.

The Kleinbahn also carried rail mail - initially only on the line to Hüttengesäß, to Langenselbold probably only from the summer schedule of 1913. The Post used the option until 1930.

The End

The small railway failed because of the economic difficulties after the First World War . The operating material was completely run down and there were often long delays. The 2nd class was no longer offered, it was hardly used in the end. The operation was repeatedly partially and temporarily stopped: in 1921 by an indefinite strike by the railway workers, in 1922 there was no longer running on weekends due to financial difficulties, at the beginning of 1923 trains were also removed from the timetable during the week, and in autumn traffic on the branch to Langenselbold was temporarily abandoned . The operating company and the district of Hanau could only agree on the modalities of (co-) financing by the district in autumn 1924. Thereupon the traffic to Langenselbold was resumed. The economic base remained weak. The attempt to drive in passenger traffic again on Sunday was given up again after a few months in 1925 due to the weak response. The following years were characterized by an economic situation on the verge of bankruptcy and discussed, but ultimately failed, attempts to secure long-term financing. On April 1, 1931, passenger traffic was discontinued and was taken over by buses. In 1932/33, five railroad workers continued to operate with two locomotives: Mondays to Fridays, a freight train drove to Hüttengesäß every day, and to Langenselbold only “as needed”.

Since the railway, which continues to run on private account, only continued to introduce deficits, and the public sector was unable to compensate for this with its funds, a decision from the regional council obliged the railway to cease operations after the end of the " beet season " on 30. November 1933. That was the operational end. In 1935 the company's operating license was withdrawn.

literature

in alphabetical order by authors / editors

• Railway Atlas Germany . Edition 2005/2006, Vlg. Schweers + Wall, o. O. 2005, ISBN 3-89494-134-0
• Jochen Fink: The Hanauer Kleinbahnen . Kenning & VGB, Nordhorn 2019. ISBN 978-3-944390-13-0
• Reichsbahndirektion Frankfurt (Main): Guide over the lines of the district of the Reichsbahndirektion Frankfurt (Main) . Printing house of the Reichsbahndirektion, Frankfurt am Main 1926, p. 137f.
• Heinz Schomann : Railway in Hessen . Railway buildings and routes 1839–1939. In: State Office for Monument Preservation Hessen (Ed.): Cultural monuments in Hessen. Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany . Three volumes in a slipcase. tape 2.2 . Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-8062-1917-6 , p. 775 f . (Route 067). [Warning: the card contains errors!]
• H. Traxel: The Hanauer Kleinbahn . In: Neues Magazin für Hanauische Geschichte 9.3 (1989), pp. 235-256.
• Gerd Wolff and Andreas Christopher: German small and private railways. Volume 8: Hesse . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2004, ISBN 3-88255-667-6 , p. 106 ff .

Remarks

1. ↑ Erected during the First World War (Fink, pp. 56, 76.).
2. ↑ Completed in 1898 (Fink, p. 56).
3. ↑ Passenger traffic ended in 1931.
4. ↑ However, the tracks are those of the siding for the barracks in Lamboy , which were relocated to the former route for the Wehrmacht after the shutdown of the small railway (Fink, p. 93).
5. ↑ In the planning phase it was also referred to as "Langenselbold Localbahnhof" and from 1905 to 1913 in the timetables as "Langenselbold Ort" (Fink, p. 76).
6. ↑ Due to an oversight by the Kassel regional council , “Hanauer Kleinbahn AG” was entered in the official register, which was not corrected until 1919 (Fink, p. 18.).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Reichsbahndirektion, p. 138: not listed here.
2. ↑ Fink, pp. 61-67.
3. ↑ Fink, p. 55.
4. ↑ Fink, p. 63.
5. ↑ Fink, p. 61.
6. ↑ Fink, p. 75.
7. ^ Fink, p. 76.
8. ^ Fink, pp. 56, 76.
9. ^ Fink, p. 76.
10. ^ Fink, p. 76.
11. ↑ Fink, p. 68.
12. ^ Fink, p. 56.
13. ↑ Fink, p. 69.
14. ^ Fink, p. 56.
15. ↑ Fink, p. 72.
16. ↑ Fink, p. 72.
17. ^ Fink, p. 56.
18. ↑ Fink, pp. 74, 94; Schomann, p. 776, does not classify the buildings as cultural monuments .
19. ↑ Fink, p. 55.
20. ↑ Fink, p. 10f.
21. ↑ Fink, p. 13.
22. ↑ Fink, p. 15.
23. ↑ Fink, p. 47.
24. ↑ Fink, p. 17.
25. ↑ Fink, p. 19.
26. ↑ Fink, p. 47.
27. ↑ Fink, p. 48.
28. ↑ Railway Directorate in Mainz (ed.): Official Gazette of the Railway Directorate in Mainz of August 5, 1922, No. 47. Announcement No. 872, p. 532.
29. ↑ Railway Directorate in Mainz (ed.): Official Gazette of the Railway Directorate in Mainz of August 5, 1922, No. 47. Announcement No. 872, p. 532.
30. ↑ Fink, p. 19f.
31. ↑ Fink, p. 47.
32. ↑ Fink, p. 47.
33. ↑ Fink, pp. 25, 29.
34. ↑ Fink, p. 25.
35. ↑ Fink, p. 27.
36. ↑ Fink, p. 28.
37. ↑ Fink, p. 30.
38. ↑ Fink, p. 30f.
39. ↑ Fink, p. 32.
40. ↑ Fink, p. 33ff.
41. ↑ Fink, p. 39.
42. ↑ Fink, p. 41.
43. ↑ Fink, p. 41.
44. ↑ Fink, p. 44.
45. ↑ Fink, p. 46.