Luis Weiler

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Luis Weiler (born September 9, 1863 in Amurrio , Spain ; † January 16, 1918 at sea off Lourenço Marques , Mozambique ) was a German railway civil engineer .

Life

Weiler was born as the son of the railway civil engineer Karl Weiler , who built railway lines in Germany , Russia and Spain , and his Spanish wife Maria Asuncion, née de Lezama y Urquijo.

After graduating from secondary school in Wiesbaden in 1882, he studied civil engineering at the Technical University of Hanover and the Technical University of Charlottenburg . In Hanover he became a member of the Corps Hannovera in 1883 . He then completed a legal clerkship as a construction manager in Stettin and Wiesbaden. After passing the 2nd state examination, he was appointed government builder ( Assessor ) and worked in Cologne in 1891/1892 .

Activities in Siam and China

Memorial pillars in front of Bangkok Hua Lamphong Station , the starting point of the Korat Railway

From 1893 to 1897 he worked as a section engineer for the route from Ayutthaya via Saraburi to Kaeng Khoi and Hinlap, a 65 km long section of the Korat Railway in Siam . The Korat Railway is an approx. 200 km long railway line from Bangkok to Nakhon Ratchasima (also: "Korat"). Subsequently, his health was in poor health and suffered from blackwater fever . So he went back to Germany, where he married Elisabeth Jung on June 18, 1898 in Wiesbaden. On the same day he traveled to China to help build the Shantung Railway . When he arrived in Shandong, he was assigned the first 60 kilometers of the railway as a section. In June 1901 he left Shandong. Another stay at the Cologne Railway Directorate followed in 1902 .

In 1903/1904 he worked on the construction of the Haifa Railway , a connection line of the Hejaz Railway , in Palestine. The Hejaz Railway was supposed to connect Damascus with Mecca and Medina , the 1,302-kilometer route to Medina was carried out with the Haifa - Akka (17 km) and Der'a-Bosra (28 km) side railways .

On July 1, 1904, he became General Director of the Siamese State Railways for 13 years . Under his leadership, the expansion of the railroad in Thailand was continued. In just five years from taking office, the route network has more than doubled from 457 km to 925 km.

After the beginning of the First World War , railway construction almost came to a standstill, and many German engineers left the country. Thailand was unable to maintain its initial neutrality in the long term. On July 22, 1917, after Siam had declared war on Germany at the urging of Great Britain, he, like all other Germans, was dismissed from the Siamese civil service and interned, after having been awarded the White Elephant Order II had been. Sick and released prematurely from captivity, he died in 1918 on the journey home to Germany on board the Danish ship Magdala near Lourenco Marques off the east coast of Africa.

Correspondence with his father by letter is of technical historical importance. This is now kept in the Deutsches Museum in Munich . Since Karl Weiler was also a railway engineer, father and son exchanged views as technical experts. Luis Weiler provided these letters with numerous detailed drawings. These letters from Weiler are the only comprehensive documentation of a German engineer who has been working abroad for years.

Fonts

  • Beginning of the railroad in Thailand. Chalermnite, Bangkok 1979.

literature

  • Rainer Falkenberg: Luis Weiler's letters from China (December 1897 - August 1901). Materials for development in Qingdao and for building the Shandong Railway. In: Kuo Heng-yü, Mechthild Leutner (ed.): Berlin China Studies, Contributions to German-Chinese Relations , 12 (1986), pp. 113-134.
  • Luis Weiler: Letters from Siam (1892-1898) , in: Rainer Falkenberg (Hrsg.): Letter and Diary - Memories of Asia (Volume 1) , Talkau 2015
  • Luis Weiler: Letters from China (1898–1901), in: Rainer Falkenberg (Hrsg.): Letter and Diary - Memories of Asia (Volume 2), Talkau 2016
  • Luis Weiler: Letters from Siam (1904–1917), in Rainer Falkenberg (Ed.): Letter and Diary - Memories of Asia (Volume 4), Talkau 2019

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1866–1966, Corps Hannovera at the Technical University of Hanover , 1966, p. 91
personal data
SURNAME Hamlet, Luis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German railway civil engineer and head of the Siamese state railway
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Amurrio , Spain
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 1918
Place of death at sea off Lourenco Marques , Mozambique