Small railway Lohne – Dinklage

Lohne – Dinklage
Former underpass of the Kleinbahn under Autobahn 1 in Brockdorf-Nord
Route number :	1564
Course book section (DB) :	220c (1950)
Route length:	7.93 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Legend Delmenhorst – Hesepe railway line 0.0 Lohne (Oldenburg) to Osnabrück 1.19 Brand 2.5 Siekmann company 7.9 Dinklage

Dinklage: Former station building

The Lohne-Dinklage small railway connected the community of Dinklage in the Lower Saxony district of Vechta with the Lohne station on the Delmenhorst – Osnabrück line . The route was eight kilometers long.

history

As early as 1885, a railway committee was formed in Dinklage . After the Delmenhorst – Osnabrück railway had reached Lohne in 1885, the Grand Ducal Oldenburg State Railways (GOE) measured the distance from Lohne to Dinklage, but the profitability calculation made from it was not encouraging.

In 1901 a memorandum was sent to the state government, which agreed to take over 40% of the construction costs. The route was built by GOE on behalf of the municipality and opened on November 15, 1904. The operation was led by the respective state railway, initially the GOE, and finally the Deutsche Bahn. When the company opened, two steam locomotives, two four-axle passenger cars, a post / baggage car and two boxcars were available. The construction cost 446,922.89 marks. In the beginning there were six pairs of trains daily, the journey time was twenty minutes. Some of the trains later ran via Lohne to Vechta, where there was a connection to Ahlhorn (-Oldenburg) .

In 1886 and 1906, interested parties had already joined forces to promote the expansion of the railway line from Celle via Schwarmstedt-Nienburg-Sulingen-Diepholz-Lohne-Dinklage to Quakenbrück . In a resolution it was unanimously decided that initially only the Diepholz-Lohne-Dinklage-Quakenbrück route could be considered.

In 1907 the stately reception building in Dinklage was completed. A goods shed was built to the east. The Dinklage station had a platform track, a bypass track and a loading track with a head ramp at the goods shed, and there was also a locomotive shed. There was a siding of the Bernard Holthaus company with its own factory locomotive.

Due to the war and the economic situation, the train traffic was reduced, mostly there were only three train pairs a day.

After almost fifty years, passenger traffic ceased on May 22, 1954. The steam locomotives were shut down in 1955 and were now operated by the small locomotive from the Lohne station. When the Federal Motorway 1 was built in the 1960s (opened for traffic in 1967), consideration was given to the still existing small railway line by building an underpass. After the Lohner station locomotive was withdrawn in 1990, the mainline locomotive on the Hesepe-Delmenhorst line ran between Lohne and Dinklage.

On July 31, 1977, the line was converted into a station track of the Lohne station. The public freight traffic continued until June 1, 1999, after which DB Cargo stopped freight traffic on the Vechta – Hesepe route and thus also to Dinklage, despite existing contracts. The city of Dinklage then looked for a new operator and provided funds for the rehabilitation of the railway line. Goods customers in Dinklage were the machine factory as well as an agricultural trade and animal feed factory, which was given its own loading platform in the early 1960s and was supplied with around 50,000 t annually by rail until the end. Until 1985, the Kleinbahn still achieved an operating surplus.

In 1998 the Jan Harpstedt museum railway was used on the route between Lohne and Dinklage. In August 2002, the DB expanded the connecting point in Lohne. On December 15, 2003, the city council of Dinklage decided to stop the small railroad.

The tracks have now been dismantled. The route, which up to a few hundred meters was prepared as a cycle path , leads directly from Lohne to Dinklage. The Dinklage train station has been renovated and its rooms are used as a laboratory by the Bröring compound feed plant.

literature

• Klaus-Peter Quill: 100 years of the Lohne – Dinklage small railway . In: The Museum Railway . No. 2/2004 , ISSN  0936-4609 , p. 19-39 .
• Bernhard Hermann: The beginning and end of a once successful company - a brief history of the Lohne - Dinklage (L.–D.) small railway . In: Yearbook for the Oldenburger Münsterland 2006 . Vechta 2005. ISBN 3-9810290-0-3 , pp. 247-255.
• Andreas Kathe: Why the small railway did not become a "large railway". Notes on the history of the Lohne – Dinklage small railway and on the “Alter Bahnhof” monument in Dinklage . In: train by train. Railway as the engine for economic development in the region . Lohne (Oldenburg) 2015, ISBN 3-945579-01-5 , pp. 121–132

Individual evidence

1. ^ Friends of the Delmenhorst-Harpstedter Eisenbahn e. V. (DEHF): "On foreign rails" - special trips on friendly railways