Small train Wesel – Rees – Emmerich

Wesel-Emmerich
Route length:	39.82 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Power system :	750 volts  =
Legend 39.82 Emmerich Stone Gate 39.00 Emmerich fishing village 38.00 Emmerich train station Transition to the Oberhausen – Arnhem railway line 37.00 Emmerich Wagenhalle 33.80 Rattles 31.50 Praest House May City limits Emmerich / Rees 28.50 Bees 26.50 Speldrop 23.60 Rees 0 according to Empel 22.80 Reesereyland Bergswick 21.50 Wolfersom 20.20 Deckershof 18.20 Haffen switch 17.80 Harbor 17.50 Haffen Dairy 16.70 More soft 15.50 Overkamp turnout 14.70 Overkamp Bettenhof City limits Rees / Wesel 13.70 Vahnum 12.20 Vissel Vissel transformer 11.00 Geldermann 9.60 Up to Mühlenfeld Delicious field Hegmann 8.00 Mars Lenders Avenue of roses Diersfordt Kockshof 4.10 Hallways Waldschänke 3.50 Hallways Wesel Feldmark Wesel brickworks 0.00 Wesel broad way Haltern – Venlo railway line Wesel Reeser Landstrasse Wesel big market Wesel Mathenakreuz ( ex town hall , exex Mathenakirche ) Wesel Berliner Tor , post office Wesel train station Transition to the Oberhausen – Arnhem railway line

The Kleinbahn Wesel – Rees – Emmerich is a former railway in the Rees district that connected the district town of Wesel with the cities of Rees and Emmerich . It ran from November 6, 1914 to December 31, 1966 on mostly its own railway track . In Wesel, the route initially ran two kilometers next to today's federal highway 8 on a separate railway body and then led along the embankments of the Rhine from place to place to come back to today's federal road 8 in Rees (today: Rauhe Straße / Weseler Landstraße) .

The trains ran every hour from Monday to Saturday between 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. and every half hour on Sundays. It took them around an hour and fifty minutes to complete the entire route. In Rees there was a connection to the Rees – Empel small railway since February 28, 1915 .

history

The tram and light rail network between Nijmegen and Wesel, around 1949

The Duewag open seating car 8 of the Kleinbahn Wesel-Rees-Emmerich ran as 437 from 1967, then from 1968 as 436 on the SSB and came to the Electrische Museumtramlijn Amsterdam in 1991

As early as 1908, the Rees district decided to build a rail link between Wesel and Emmerich via Rees, based on an expert report from 1909 as an electrically operated, regular- gauge small train . In Wesel a link was to be established with the state railway to Bocholt , Münster , Oberhausen and Venlo , in Emmerich with the Rhine ferry to Kleve operated by Klever Straßenbahn GmbH and with the Dutch tram from Zutphen – Emmerich , which opened on June 4, 1903 . On July 23, 1910, the Rees district council decided to build this small train. RWE was commissioned with the construction and operation . In the same year, a subsidiary of RWE, Rheinisch-Westfälische Straßen- und Kleinbahnen GmbH , began construction work. She received the concession for the section between Wesel and Rees on August 5, 1912 and on April 29, 1916 for the section between Rees and Emmerich.

As early as November 6, 1914, the Wesel – Rees line went into operation. In Wesel, however, she could not until 1951, as originally planned, through the city center to the Staatsbahnhof be performed because the Prussian state railways , the plan junction of strategic importance as classified state railway line to Venlo failed. The completion of the section between Rees and Emmerich was delayed due to the outbreak of the First World War . Because the overhead lines were still missing in this section, operations began on November 6, 1914, initially with a steam locomotive . In November 1919, the first part of the second section to Vrasselt was electrified. The last part to Emmerich followed on May 3, 1921, so that from that day on the 39.82 kilometers long route could be driven electrically.

During the Second World War, the railway was badly damaged in the bombing raids on the city of Emmerich on October 7, 1944, on the city of Rees on October 23, 1944, and in another bombing on February 24, 1945. After that, operations that had been able to be maintained along the entire route up to that point were discontinued.

Operations were not resumed on the section between Rees and Emmerich. On July 13, 1950, the Rees district decided to put the railway between Wesel and Rees back into operation. The tracks and all overhead line masts between Rees and Emmerich were dismantled and used to repair the southern section of the line. On June 9, 1951, after more than six years, the Wesel – Rees small railway was put back into operation over a length of 25.8 kilometers. Because the Wesel railway bridge, which was destroyed in the war, was not rebuilt in the course of the railway line to Venlo , the German Federal Railroad now also allowed a level crossing of its line, which was degraded to a siding for freight traffic during the war .

This made it possible to extend the small train running through Wesel city center by two kilometers via Reeser Landstrasse, Grafenring, Hansaring, Willibrordiplatz , Pastor-Bölitz-Strasse, Goldstrasse, Brückstrasse, Viehor, Hohe Strasse, Berliner-Tor-Platz and Wilhelmstrasse to Wesel station , whereby this single-track new line, which included five new stops, was laid out on grooved rails similar to a tram . From then on, the vehicles were equipped with direction indicators for use on public roads , and all stops were marked with the circular yellow-green traffic sign 224 of the Road Traffic Act . They were at the double-track terminus at the train station, at Berliner-Tor-Platz (post office), at Mathenakreuz (town hall, today Kaufhof), on Feldstrasse opposite the Great Market and on Hansaring.

attitude

On February 28, 1964, the district council of the Rees district in Wesel decided to discontinue this because of the increasingly worsening utilization of the railway. On April 30, 1966, the lease agreement with RWE, which ran until 1976, was terminated and the RWE was paid 1.1 million Deutschmarks in compensation. The last train between Rees and Wesel then ran on April 30, 1966. The transport of goods between Rees and Empel ended on December 31, 1966. The line was dismantled, the track body is now used in sections as a cycle path . The depot became the property of Kreis Reeser Verkehrsgesellschaft mbH and its legal successor, NIAG , and was used for buses .

vehicles

In 1914 seven two-axle railcars and seven two-axle trailer cars were delivered by the Uerdingen wagon factory , and in 1920 three similar railcars and two trailer cars were added. AEG supplied three two-axle locomotives for freight traffic in 1913 and 1916 respectively . In the absence of demand, they were initially given to the Kleinbahn Siegburg – Zündorf , and two locomotives of the same type came back from there in 1919 to start traffic to Emmerich. Since the vehicle fleet had been almost completely destroyed during the war, operations began in 1951 with four body cars from the Uerdingen wagon factory and two sidecars from the Opladen – Ohligs tram . In 1960 two four-axle Duewag open seating cars were procured. After ceasing to operate, they were sold to Stadtwerke Bonn . One of them is in operation today at the Histotram Ferlach in Carinthia / Austria in the museum.

See also

• List of disused railway lines in North Rhine-Westphalia

literature

• Hans-Paul Höpfner: Railways - your story on the Lower Rhine. Mercator, Duisburg 1986, ISBN 3-87463-132-X .
• Dieter Roos: Small railways in the Emmerich area. Self-published, Emmerich 1987.
• Irmgard Hantsche: The development of the railway network on the lower Lower Rhine up to the First World War. In: Jürgen Becks, Martin Wilhelm Roelen (Ed.): Railways on the Lower Rhine. City of Wesel, Wesel 2005, ISBN 3-924380-75-9 , pp. 21-53.
• Dieter Höltge: Trams and light rail vehicles in Germany, Volume 9 Lower Rhine without Duisburg. EK-Verlag, Freiburg i. Br. 2004, ISBN 3-88255-390-1 .
• Evert Heusinkveld: The small railways Rees - Empel and Wesel - Rees - Emmerich. Nordhorn 2013, ISBN 978-3-933613-89-9 .
• Jörg Petzold, Axel Reuther: Small Railway Anniversaries 2014. In: The Museum Railway. 1/2014, pp. 22-24.

Web links

• Finding aid Kleinbahn Wesel-Rees-Emmerich Kreisarchiv Kleve

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Entry by Claus Weber on Kleinbahn Wesel-Rees-Emmerich, 1914–1945 in the database " KuLaDig " of the Rhineland Regional Association (2013), accessed on February 15, 2017.
2. ^ According to Jörg Petzold, Axel Reuther: Kleinbahnjubilänen 2014. In: Die Museums-Eisenbahn. 1/2014, p. 22: as early as May 25, 1914.
3. ↑ Martin Wilhelm Roelen: The economic development of the Lower Rhine in the age of the railway. In: Jürgen Becks, Martin Wilhelm Roelen (Ed.): Railways on the Lower Rhine. Wesel 2005, ISBN 3-924380-75-9 .
4. ^ Entry by Claus Weber on Kleinbahn Wesel-Rees, 1951–1966 in the " KuLaDig " database of the Rhineland Regional Association (2013), accessed on February 15, 2017.
5. ↑ Reference date: June 8, 1951 - A tram for Wesel , article on wesel.de, accessed on September 21, 2017