East Prussian Southern Railway
The Ostpreußische Südbahn-Gesellschaft was a railway company in East Prussia.
history
The company was founded on October 10, 1863 by mostly English investors. Its first line was opened on September 11, 1865 from the Licent train station in the provincial capital Königsberg in a westerly direction to the seaport of Pillau on the Fresh Spit , 46 kilometers away .
Since September 16, 1884, an 18-kilometer branch line to Palmnicken on the Samland amber coast branched off at the Fischhausen intermediate station . This was extended to Groß Dirschkeim on October 4, 1936 .
The main goal of the company was to create a 195 kilometer long connection from Königsberg via Lyck to the then Prussian - Russian border at Prostken. The first section was put into operation on September 24, 1866 from the Königsberg Südbahnhof to Bartenstein . Further sections followed on November 1, 1867 to Rastenburg and on December 8, 1868 to Lyck. Finally, on November 1, 1871, the border station Prostken-Saltzwedell was reached, where the connection to the Russian Southwest Railway was made on September 15, 1873.
Between Prostken and Grajewo there was one track in standard gauge and one in Russian broad gauge, so that the trains could always continue across the border to the neighboring country. In doing so, she “joined the ranks of the great arteries of world traffic” (von Mayer). The entire route network of the East Prussian Southern Railway was 260 kilometers in length. In what is now Polish , Belarusian and Ukrainian territory, the line continued via Białystok and the Brest Zentralny station to Odessa .
The Chairman of the Board of Directors was Count Lehndorff . From July 1, 1903, the Southern Railway was part of the Prussian State Railway . After 1920 it was under the Reichsbahndirektion Königsberg .
See also
- Kaliningrad – Baltiysk railway line
- Kaliningrad – Bagrationovsk railway line
- Głomno – Białystok railway line
literature
- Arthur von Mayer: History and geography of the German railways. 2nd volume. Wilhelm Baensch Verlagshandlung, Berlin 1891, pp. 1223ff.
- German course book. Complete edition of the Reichsbahn course books , edition dated June 21, 1940
- Karl-Eberhard Murawski: Bethel Henry Strousberg and the railway construction in East Prussia , in: Michael Brocke , Margret Heitmann , Harald Lordick (eds.): On the history and culture of the Jews in East and West Prussia . Hildesheim: Olms, 2000, pp. 397-404
