Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel
|
Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel Cochem tunnel
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Entrance to the north portal in Cochem.
Front: the historic portal. Background: The tunnel entrance, which was set back today. In between: The parts of the remaining fan system. |
||||
| use | Railway tunnel | |||
| traffic connection | Moselle route | |||
| place |
Ediger-Eller , Cochem , Rhineland-Palatinate , Germany
|
|||
| length | old tube: 4205 m new tube: 4242 m |
|||
| Number of tubes | 2 (2 tracks) | |||
| construction | ||||
| start of building | May 15, 1874 | |||
| completion | May 15, 1879 | |||
| location | ||||
|
||||
| Coordinates | ||||
| North portal | 50 ° 8 ′ 48 " N , 7 ° 9 ′ 48" E | |||
| South portal | 50 ° 6 ′ 41 ″ N , 7 ° 8 ′ 36 ″ E | |||
Map with all coordinates: 
The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Tunnel (also called Cochemer Tunnel ) is a railway tunnel on the Moselle route between Ediger-Eller and Cochem . The western tube (so-called AKWT = old Kaiser Wilhelm tunnel) is 4,205 meters long and was Germany 's longest railway tunnel through a natural obstacle until 1988 . It was built from 1874 to 1877. Like other outstanding buildings he was sent to the German Emperor I. Wilhelm named.
Location and course
The northern portal of the tunnel is located in the middle of the city of Cochem. The southern portal in the Ellerbachtal is around 500 meters in front of the Ediger-Eller train station . Immediately after the station, the train crosses the Moselle on a steel bridge and it goes through the 367 m long Petersberg tunnel to Neef . This structure (tunnel, bridge and tunnel) made it possible to bypass the Moselkrampen and the large Moselle loop at Calmont (from Cochem to Neef) and shorten the distance from 30 kilometers to five kilometers. The route is almost straight.
The bottom of the tunnel of the AKWT has a bend in the middle (culminating point) in order to divert the incoming mountain water to both sides. This is the reason why one cannot see the opposite portal from one tunnel portal, although the tunnel is dead straight. The difference in height between the two portals is almost 14 meters. At regular intervals, a total of 419 safety niches are built into the side walls as shelters and every 400 meters a room closed with a door with light and telephone.
The AKWT was designed and planned in two ways. After the renovation is complete, there will only be one track in each tube. The former track spacing in the AKWT was 3.50 m. Safety niches were installed at intervals of 15 to 18 m.
At the end of the 1960s, RWE planned the Untersee for the large Bremm pumped storage plant in the Ellerbachtal, i.e. in the immediate vicinity of the south portal . However, the construction of the power plant was rejected.
From 1972 to 1974 the line was electrified, for which the tunnel floor was lowered by 60 cm.
In order to ensure the supply of extinguishing water in the event of a fire in the tunnel, the Deutsche Bundesbahn kept fire water tenders in readiness at the Cochem and Ediger-Eller stations. To enable immediate fire fighting, the tender also included a portable pump, hose material and nozzles. The tenders were supplemented by a so-called disaster control vehicle. It was a flat wagon on which the fire truck (TLF) 16 of the Cochem volunteer fire brigade and the portable fire pump (TSF) of the Ediger-Eller volunteer fire brigade were transported in the event of an alarm. Regular exercises continued. In 1988 the tenders including the flat wagons were replaced by tank wagons. Flat wagons were again used to transport the emergency vehicles. Due to the extinguishing water supply line in the tunnel, the vehicles kept in reserve had become superfluous.
For fire protection measures, a continuous extinguishing water supply line was installed in the tunnel in 2000; in addition, the tunnel can be lit continuously. The volunteer fire brigades in Ediger-Eller and in Cochem each received a special fire fighting vehicle for around 500,000 euros as well as special training in tunnel rescue and fire fighting in tunnels. There have been no major accidents in the Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel recently. Despite all the measures mentioned, its general security level no longer corresponds to today's standards.
Old ventilation technology AKWT
Fans
Like no other German railway tunnel, the Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel confronted engineers with major ventilation problems: with the increasing train frequency and the rapidly increasing performance of the locomotives in the years 1880 to 1900, the problem of removing fumes and smoke gases from the Tunnel too. Artificial remedial action had to be created by building a corresponding ventilation system.
This initially consisted of two Saccardo type fan blowers housed in the still existing machine house at the north portal (Cochem), which were put into operation in 1904. This involved two radial fans with an impeller diameter of 3.5 meters and an output of 100 cubic meters per second each. If both fans were running at the same time (200 m³ / s), the air speed was still 2.4 meters per second with the strongest headwind.
The fans were driven by an electric motor with 150 kW (= 204 hp) and a diesel engine with 175 hp. The efficiency of this system was only four to seven percent and the annual electricity consumption added up to 850,000 kilowatt hours.
The system proved itself until around 1913, but was then no longer sufficient, as the smoke in the tunnel increased continuously as a result of the increasing number of trains. Ultimately, it was also found that the trains traveling from Eller to Cochem took some of the smoke back into the tunnel. The predominantly eastward wind also counteracted the Saccardo system. It was therefore decided to sink a ventilation shaft.
Ventilation shaft
This 230-meter-deep shaft with a diameter of four meters, which was built between 1913 and 1915, is located at kilometers 51 + 488, around 1125 meters from the south portal at a valley-side distance of 15 meters from the tunnel axis. The shaft chair, which, like the entire shaft, was bricked in clinker, was connected to the tunnel by an arched cross tunnel that forked into two branches that ended about five meters apart at the abutment.
The shaft looked like a chimney and had an extraordinarily good natural draft.
However, since this device was still not sufficient, a suction system of the Rateau design with a similar impeller diameter to the north portal was installed at the head of the shaft, which protruded six meters above the site . The manhole mouth could be closed mechanically and exhaust steam and exhaust gases sucked off. Usually this extraction system only ran at night on the mountain when tunnel workers were working in the tunnel. It was a radial fan with an output of 200 cubic meters per second, which was driven by an electric motor with 150 kW (= 204 PS).
Annual electricity consumption ranged from 32,000 kWh in the beginning to 116,000 kWh in the 1970s.
However, since this system was unable to cope with the exhaust gases of the constantly growing train traffic in the long term (the plug of smoke had now shifted to the center of the tunnel because the system sucked off the tunnel section leading to Eller), the old Saccardo system at the north portal was replaced in 1937 Suggestion from Prof. Dr. Ing.Föttinger from the aerodynamic institute in Berlin-Charlottenburg was replaced by ten high-performance screw fans of the Siemens-Betz type (and not "Föttinger type", as is often read). The extraction system on the mountain was shut down when the new Siemens-Betz fans went into operation in 1938; only the locking mechanism remained in function in order to be able to control the air flow in the tunnel areas Cochem-Schacht or Schacht-Eller or Cochem-Eller as required.
After the renovation of the north portal in 1937/38, a reinforced concrete structure accommodated ten individual fans that were positioned radially around the portal. For aerodynamic reasons, the axes of the fans were inclined at 14 degrees to the tunnel axis. Each fan was a low-speed electric motor embedded in an iron pipe with an eight-bladed propeller attached to its rotating shaft. The impeller diameter was 1700 millimeters.
At a speed of 480 revolutions per minute, each of these turbines delivered 39.5 cubic meters of fresh air per second into the tunnel. As a rule, four of the ten turbines were always in operation, blowing around 160 cubic meters of fresh air into the tunnel every second. When all ten fans were running at full speed, nearly 400 cubic meters of air per second could be released at a speed of up to 8 m / sec. be pushed through the tunnel, which covered the 4,205-meter-long route in just nine minutes. Free standing upright in the tunnel was no longer possible with seven fans running at the same time. Each of these motors consumed 19 kilowatts of power.
The annual requirement of this plant averaged 1.2 million kilowatt hours.
The facilities before the complete renovation in 2014
The air shaft lost its function with electrification (1974) and finally with the last, festively decorated steam locomotive in 1976 - more than that, it became a constantly growing danger: the vertical hydrostatically pressureless shaft tube, standing vertically in the mountain, looked like a 230 m deep well which received a large amount of groundwater. Even if it hadn't rained for several weeks in a dry summer, large amounts of water accumulated deep down in the shaft chair. When walking through the tunnel, one could already make out the shaft from afar by the loud noise.
Over the years and decades, the continuously flowing mountain water flushed out more and more mortar or decomposed it. The masonry of the shaft wall became unstable and fell into the shaft chair. At last there was a pile of fallen clinker bricks and entire parts of the wall several meters high. There was a risk that one day such large masses would collapse that they would fall through the air ducts onto the track bed. A necessary rehabilitation of the non-functioning shaft would only have been possible by a specialist mining company and would have cost millions.
As a result, the then Federal Railway Directorate in Saarbrücken decided to close the shaft chair with a concrete stool and to fill the shaft completely, which happened in 1989 as a result of the demolition material from the machine and transformer buildings on the mountain as well as unpolluted soil that was driven over.
Hardly anything can be seen today of the above-ground installation on the Cochemer Berg; only the fence posts that remained standing and made of old railroad tracks testify that this was once a railway company premises. In the tunnel 230 meters below, only the two air ducts coming out of the transverse gallery tell of the shaft's former existence. The cross tunnel ends at the approximately five meter high wall of the concrete stool on which the filled shaft stands. In contrast to the air shaft in the Bruttig-Treis tunnel , which is only closed above ground and is only a few kilometers away as the crow flies, the air shaft of the Kaiser Wilhelm tunnel no longer exists.
Of the ten Siemens Bentz fans on the north portal, the two lower ones and the two at the top in the ridge area were removed in the mid-1980s and, after being temporarily stored in the former machine house, finally scrapped when it was handed over to third parties. The other six fans remained connected to the mains and were ready for operation. They could be switched individually or together - both from the electrical part of the former machine house at the north portal, which was still operated by Deutsche Bahn, and from the dispatcher at Cochem station. In the rear part of the old machine house there was also a large stationary emergency power unit with which the fans could be operated if the traction current failed.
They had proven themselves very well in sandblasting work in the tunnel and would ensure the smoke gas discharge to the south portal in the event of a train fire in the tunnel.
In the course of the renovation of the tunnel, the fans at the north portal were removed at the beginning of 2015, the concrete wall in which they were inserted will be removed during the ongoing renovation. The tunnel is then to be extended again to the historic tunnel portal (which has been free-standing since the installation of the ventilation system).
Accidents
Accident of December 27, 1913
On December 27, 1913, a section of track was replaced after a broken rail . The construction workers failed to secure the construction site, and the dispatcher in Cochem gave a freight train exit from the station, although he had to know that the work was not yet completed. The train derailed as it ran over the construction site when the track was removed but not yet replaced. An oncoming freight train then drove into the derailed train. Two people were killed in the accident and four others were injured.
Accident on November 22, 1948
When the express train D 21 was traveling from Paris to Koblenz there was a coal dust explosion in the driver's cab in the tunnel, which then caught fire. The courageous intervention of the engine driver August Vochtel prevented a catastrophe.
Accident on November 22, 1997
On November 22, 1997, a freight train from Dillingen (Saar) to the Gremberg marshalling yard lost a five-ton steel slab in the tunnel , which fell from a wagon whose load was insufficiently secured. Then a second slab came loose and damaged a wagon of an oncoming freight train when it slipped before it also fell down. The locomotive of the oncoming train hit the first slab that had fallen and pushed it 600 meters in front of it.
expansion
To improve safety, a second parallel 4242 meter long tunnel tube was built (NKWT = new Kaiser Wilhelm tunnel). In the final state, both tubes should only accommodate one track each and be connected to one another via eight hermetically sealable cross tunnels. The planning approval documents provided for around 900,000 t of excavated material. In order to avoid around 36,000 truck journeys through Cochem or the Moselle valley near Eller, these quantities were transported away by rail freight wagons and used for backfilling and recultivation of a clay mine near Wallmerod in the Westerwaldkreis.
The planned costs in 2008 were 200 million euros. The construction costs were given in 2012 at around 210 million euros. Of this, around 135 million euros will be used for the new construction and around 75 million euros for the renovation of the existing tube.
The construction of the second tube of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Tunnel began at Ediger-Eller at the beginning of 2010. In 2012 the construction of the new tunnel should be completed. But this could not be met.
From mid-June 2012, in front of the southern portal north of Ediger-Eller, track systems and points of the old directional track in the direction of Koblenz were dismantled. This created space for the construction of the track in the new tube. Until the completion of both tubes, rail traffic was only led through the old tube on a single track.
The new tube was opened to traffic on April 7, 2014. The first train to travel through the tube was a regional train from Trier to Koblenz. Between 2014 and 2017, the old tunnel was renewed and converted to single-track operation. During the renovation of the old tunnel, the new tunnel was single-tracked in both directions.
Since July 2, 2017, the line can once again be used on two tracks (one track per tunnel tube).
During the 2004 plan approval process , it was planned to start work in 2006 and to complete it by 2012.
Before the start of the construction work, around 170 trains per day drove through the tunnel, with an average speed of 90 to 120 km / h.
Construction data
- May 15, 1874: Start of construction work in Eller , three months later in Cochem
- 1875: Use of machines, previously it was driven by hand
- May 4, 1877: Piercing and lining of the vaults
- January 1, 1878: First passage of a train
- May 15, 1879: Clearance for rail traffic
- 1972–1974: electrification
- August 13, 2008: Start of construction of the second tunnel tube
- November 7, 2011: tunnel breakthrough
- June 23, 2012: Public inspection of the shell
- April 7, 2014: Commissioning of the new tunnel tube
- 2014: Renewal of the existing tunnel
- 2015: Installation of the slab track and the technical equipment in the existing tunnel
- July 2, 2017: Reopening of the existing tunnel
- Beginning of October 2017: Start-up celebration after completion of the remaining work
literature
- Udo Kandler: The Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel . In: Eisenbahn-Journal . Special 08, 1991, ISBN 3-922404-26-X , pp. 34-43
- Udo Kandler: The Emperor's Tunnel . In: Eisenbahn-Journal. Issue 02, 2007, ISSN 0720-051X , pp. 12-21
- Hansjürgen Wenzel: 100 years of the Cochem tunnel . In: Railway courier . Issue 05, 1979, ISSN 0170-5288 , p. 5 ff.
- Gerd Wolff: The ventilation systems of the Kaiser Wilhelm tunnel. 1st part . In: Railway courier. Issue 12, 1988, ISSN 0170-5288 , pp. 20-26
- Gerd Wolff: The ventilation systems of the Kaiser Wilhelm tunnel. 2nd part . In: Railway courier. Issue 01, 1989, ISSN 0170-5288 , pp. 26-31
- Bodo Tauch: Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel: From planning to execution . In: tunnel . Official organ of the STUVA . No. 1/2013 . Bauverlag BV GmbH, Gütersloh February 2013, p. 24-33 .
Web links
- Images of the tunnel portals
- Entry in the "Encyclopedia of Railways" by Dr. Baron v. Röll, 2nd edition 1912–1923
- nkwt.de documents the conversion of the Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel to two single-track tubes and the history of the structure.
Individual evidence
Data and facts about the tunnel's ventilation problem:
- Archive of the former Federal Railway Directorate Saarbrücken
- Archive of the Deutsche Bahn AG, Berlin, Frankfurt, Koblenz
- ↑ a b c d e f Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel . In: DB ProjektBau (ed.): Infrastructure projects 2012: Building at Deutsche Bahn . Eurailpress, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7771-0445-4 , pp. 202-205 .
- ↑ eisenbahn-magazin 6/2014, p. 35
- ↑ See the information and photos at http://www.nkwt.de/
- ↑ a b c Judicial aftermath of the accident in the Kochem tunnel. In: Newspaper of the Association of German Railway Administrations, Volume 54, No. 40 (May 23, 1914), pp. 644–645.
- ↑ Erich Preuss: Railway accidents at the Deutsche Bahn. Causes - Background - Consequences. Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-613-71229-6 , p. 138
- ^ Announcement planning the new Kaiser Wilhelm tunnel . In: Railway technical review . 53, No. 5, 2004, p. 320
- ↑ a b Press releases 024/2010 of the DB Group: Tunneling machine presented for the construction project of the century on the Moselle route
- ^ Trierischen Volksfreund dated February 11, 2010: A tunnel of superlatives
- ↑ http://www.swr.de/landesschau-aktuell/rp/nach-knapp-vier-jahren-bauzeit-neuer-kaiser-wilhelm-bahntunnel-freighaben/-/id=1682/did=13175080/nid=1682 /1k2pdg8/index.html
- ↑ The Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel is being renovated . In: Eisenbahn-Revue International , issue 6/2004, ISSN 1421-2811 , p. 250 f.
- ↑ Drill breaks through the mountain: The second tube for the Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel is there (Rhein Zeitung of November 7, 2011)
- ↑ nkwt.de reports on the event "Tunnel breakthrough in Cochem"
- ↑ nkwt.de reports on the commissioning of the new tunnel tube
- ↑ Construction project Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel | BauInfoPortal of Deutsche Bahn. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on August 7, 2017 ; accessed on August 7, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
