Kohlerer Bahn

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Second Kohlerer Bahn (1912–1943)
The cab of the Kohlerer Bahn between 1965 and 2006

The Kohlerer Bahn is the first alpine cable car for passenger transport. The aerial tramway was put into operation in 1908 and still connects the South Tyrolean capital Bozen with the mountain village of Kohlern .

First Kohlerer Bahn

The Kohlerer cable car in the municipality of Zwölfmalgrei was opened on June 29, 1908 and connected the district of Kampill over a total distance of 1.5 km with the houses on Kohlern. The innkeeper Josef Staffler from Bolzano had started and carried out this undertaking on his own with personal financial means. Ing.Haas was the designer. The railway was built by the Maschinen- und Waggonbau-Fabriks-Aktiengesellschaft in Simmering, formerly HD Schmid . The opening took place one month before the Wetterhorn elevator in Switzerland.

The railway had wooden supports and a suspension rope, but for safety reasons it already had two traction ropes. The six-seater car with its sloping construction was similar to the construction of many funiculars: the bench on the mountain side was arranged higher than the one on the valley side to make it easier to get on and off the stair-like platforms. The car was suspended from two drives, each with two rollers, arranged one behind the other, so that the incline of the car always followed the incline of the rope. The railway was in operation for two years, during which it carried over 100,000 people without accidents. Operation was then banned by the railway authority responsible for cable cars because the wooden cable car supports did not seem to be sufficiently safe.

Technical data of the first Kohlerer Bahn

  • Route length: 1500 m
  • Greatest slope: 80%
  • Difference in altitude: 795 m
  • Altitude quota achieved: 1140 m
  • Capacity: 6 people per cabin
  • Travel speed: 1.6 m / s
  • maximum conveying capacity: 24 people per hour

Second Kohlerer Bahn

The owner then commissioned Adolf Bleichert & Co. to build a new facility. This system, which was completed at the end of 1912 and commissioned on May 10, 1913 after extensive inspections by the Austro-Hungarian Railway Ministry, had twelve iron supports and two suspension ropes anchored at the mountain station on each side, which were tensioned in the valley with weights, and two haulage ropes with corresponding ones Opposite ropes on the valley side, which also had tension weights in the valley. The bogies contained two seesaws, each with two rollers per suspension cable, so that the weight of the car was transferred to the two suspension cables by a total of eight rollers. The cabins for 17 people had - similar to a railway wagon - open platforms at both ends and drove with max. 2 m / s (7.2 km / h) on a route that reached gradients of up to 100%.

This second Kohlerer Bahn was destroyed in 1943 during the fifth major air raid by Allied bombers on Bolzano.

Technical data of the second Kohlerer Bahn

  • Route length: 1630 m
  • Greatest slope: 107%
  • Difference in altitude: 842 m
  • Altitude quota achieved: 1129 m
  • Capacity: 16 people per cabin
  • Travel speed: 2.0 m / s
  • maximum conveying capacity: 80 people per hour

Third Kohlerer Bahn

A new building by Hölzl Seilbahnbau was not carried out until 1963/64 and officially put into operation in January 1965. This cable car has a suspension cable, a pulling cable and closed cabins in the form common at the time. The plant was modernized in 1986. In 2006 it received new cabins for 20 people and fully automated equipment for the valley station. In 2017, the railway was integrated into the South Tyrol transport association .

Technical data of the third (today's) Kohlerer Bahn

  • Inclined length : 1650 m
  • Difference in altitude: 843 m
  • Altitude quota achieved: 1110 m
  • Travel time: 5 min.
  • Capacity: 25 people per cabin, new cabins for 20 people each from 2006
  • Travel speed: 8.0 m / s

Discussion about the title

Even if it is often claimed that the Kohlerer Bahn is the first cable car in the world (for example, the website of the Technikmuseum tecneum) or the first cable car in the world solely for passenger transport , this is still not correct. The numerous material ropeways that were in operation around the turn of the century often also carried out passenger transports, even if not for purely tourist traffic. So had z. For example, the Chilecito-La Mejicana material ropeway , which was built by Adolf Bleichert & Co. and opened in 1905, is a separate, closed passenger gondola . The first cable car to be used solely for passenger transport was the cable car to Monte Ulia, built by Leonardo Torres Quevedo in 1907 in San Sebastián (it was discontinued in August 1912). The suspension railway Dresden opened in 1901 , a cable-driven mountain rail suspension railway , is even older, but not a direct competitor because it is not a cable car. The Kohlerer Bahn is therefore only the first aerial cableway for passenger transport in Central Europe or in the Alpine region. But it is also the first "modern" cable car for people in the world, with wagons attached to the chassis and many other extensive technical innovations.

literature

  • Deutsche Bauzeitung , 42nd year 1908, supplement 26 to no. 51 (from June 24, 1908), p. [B] 102. (Note on the upcoming opening with technical information)
  • Hans Wettich: Passenger suspension railway on the Kohlererberg near Bozen (System Bleichert & Co.). In: Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 47, 1913, No. 24 (from March 22, 1913), pp. 213–217 / No. 25 (from March 26, 1913), pp. 221–224. ( Digital version on kobv.de; PDF, 61.2 MB; and Commons )
  • Karl Armbruster: The Tyrolean mountain railways . Buchdruckerei G. Davis & Co., Vienna 1914, Die Kohlernbahn, p. 162–176 ( digitized version from the South Tyrolean Regional Library [accessed on September 15, 2017]).
  • P. Stephan: The cable cars . 2nd Edition. Published by Julius Springer, Berlin 1914, p. 280 ff . ( Digitized at archive.org [accessed October 24, 2011]).
  • FA Talbot: Aerial Mountain Railways . 1914 ( digitized [accessed October 24, 2011]).
  • Norbert Mumelter: The first mountain suspension railway in the world Bozen – Kohlern . Ed .: Heimatschutzverein Bozen. Bolzano 1983.
  • Elisabeth Baumgartner: From the viewing area to the panorama lift. The world's first cable car from Bozen to Kohlern. In: Same: Railway Landscape Alt-Tirol: Transport history between Kufstein and Ala in the field of tension between tourism, politics and culture. Innsbruck: Haymon 1990, pp. 266-291.
  • Autonomous Province of Bolzano - South Tyrol, Mobility Department (Ed.): 100 Years of the Kohlerer Railway: 1908–2008 . Spectrum, Bozen 2008, ISBN 978-88-601-1123-4 .

Web links

Commons : Kohlerer Bahn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The Kohlern Railway. (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; accessed on October 24, 2011 (PDF file; 24.4 MB).  ( 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.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.bleichert-seilbahn.de  

Coordinates: 46 ° 29 ′ 26.3 "  N , 11 ° 22 ′ 6.4"  E