Post-U-Bahn Munich
The Post-U-Bahn Munich was an unmanned electrical works train of the Deutsche Bundespost that existed from 1910 to 1988 , which transported mail and parcels underground from Munich main station over a distance of up to 450 m to the nearby post office on Hopfenstrasse. The railway and its tunnels were completely renewed several times and finally stopped when the post office moved. Subsequently, the mail was no longer transported on rails, but with electric carts in a tunnel that was only 200 m long. With the end of rail mail in Germany in 1997 and the opening of the Munich letter center in June 1998, operations ceased completely.
history
Munich Central Station was in the immediate vicinity of the Royal Bavarian Ministry of Transport , which was built between 1906 and 1913, and the railway post office was also set up in the side wing on Hopfenstrasse. The Munich 2 post office was located in the same building complex on Arnulfstrasse . In between, Arnulfstrasse ran in an east-west direction and the Seidlstrasse crossing it, two major traffic axes.
Therefore, with the construction of the post office, an initially 350 m long tunnel was built, which was led from the cross platform under the Starnberg wing station in a curve under the Arnulfstraße. It lowered itself and crossed under Seidlstrasse and the main collecting canals running there at its lowest point, which is around 6.80 m below street level. From here the tunnel ran into the cellar of the Munich 2 post office and continued in a curve to the provisional end point under the courtyard of the Ministry of Transport. The tunnel was 2.34 m wide and 1.18 m high and was built from prefabricated concrete parts and sealed against the groundwater from the outside. Operations began on October 10, 1910.
In the Third Reich , extensive plans were made to redesign the traffic routes in Munich. The main station , built as a terminal station , was to be relocated to a through station at Laim . This concept also included a post-subway route from Pasing to Munich-Riem Airport . The plans only reached an early stage and implementation has not started.
After war damage from 1944 and 1945, the tunnels and the railway were repaired. In 1948 the Post-U-Bahn resumed operations. In 1950 the railway post office was rebuilt due to the sharp increase in mail volume and the railway was extended by a good 50 m to directly below the new mail service. The old terminus became the depot .
In 1966, the Deutsche Bundesbahn began work on the first construction phase of the Munich S-Bahn , which made it necessary to relocate the Post-U-Bahn tunnel under Seidlstrasse. Operations ceased on August 4, 1966 and the new tunnel was built. Under Seidlstrasse and Arnulfstrasse, a new section was built again from precast concrete pipes, through which the total length was 405 m. It was close to the surface and crossed the lower S-Bahn in Arnulfstrasse. As early as December 20, 1966, the letter post subway resumed operations. The railway technology was also replaced.
In 1970 the station at Munich Post Office 2 was given up. On April 21, 1988 the underground service was stopped. In the shortened tunnel to the post office, which was newly built on the old property, the mail was transported with manned electric carts. This eliminated the time-consuming, two-time reloading onto the Post-U-Bahn. With the nationwide conversion of letter sorting to central letter centers and the discontinuation of rail mail, the transport between the train station and the " Hopfenpost " ended.
During the construction of the second main S-Bahn line , the abandoned tunnel will be used from 2019 to divert groundwater that is pumped out of the excavation under the main train station.
technology
The first train from 1910 was a joint project by Locomotivfabriken Krauss & Comp. for the mechanical part and Siemens-Schuckertwerke for the electrics. It was operated at a track width of 450 mm with three-phase alternating current of 155 volts and 50 Hertz. Two phases were designed as an overhead line , the rails served as the third phase. The route was always energized, the stations were only switched on when leaving. A simple block protection was thus achieved. The line was laid out on two tracks, on each track a train consisting of four wagons and the locomotive in the middle shuttled . The locomotives achieved 3 HP (2.2 kW ) and a speed of 10 to 12 km / h. Each car could take 120 kg. The travel time was around 100 seconds, and ten trains per hour could be handled. The three locomotives (two in service, one reserve) were handed over to the Deutsches Museum , the Museum for Communication Nuremberg and the Bundespostmuseum in Frankfurt after they were closed .
The new building from 1966 came from Brown, Boveri & Cie. and used a conductor rail with 220 volts direct current in the middle of the track. The two tracks were connected in the stations with fallback switches , so that an approximate roundabout was created. Ten block sections were built in for security. There were three automatically controlled trains from a locomotive with four single-axle cars. A fourth locomotive was kept in reserve. The locomotives developed 6.8 kW with a pulling force of 2500 N at a maximum speed of 10 km / h and a consequent travel time of 132 seconds. The trolleys were emptied onto a conveyor belt using a tilting mechanism, which led to the mail bags being suspended automatically . Around 100 post office workers loaded and unloaded the subway cars and the conveyor belt and delivered around 11,000 mail bags a day to the letter sorting facility. Three of the four locomotives were returned to the same museums that the predecessors had received.
More tracks
The Munich Post-U-Bahn was the first in the world and the only one of its kind in Germany. In 1928 the largest comparable facility began operations in London . The London Post Office Railway initially connected eight and until 2003 three post offices underground. In Lucerne in 1937, a short tube railway on rails for the underground transport of mail opened. In Zurich between 1938 and 1980 there was another 340 m long subway between the Sihlpost and the Zurich 23 station post office . The Munich facility was used as a model and visited by experts from other cities.
For individual letters there was the pneumatic tube in Munich , the first forerunner of which began in 1877. The actual pneumatic tube network existed from 1922. It was badly damaged in the Second World War. It resumed operations in 1953, but was shut down a few years later.
See also
literature
- Peter Gürlich: The letter post subway in Munich . In: Archives for Postal History in Bavaria , Volume 13, pp. 197-199 (1969)
- Bernhard Brandmair: Post subway in Munich. In: f + h support and lift - magazine for material flow and automation in production, storage, transport and handling . Mainz, Vereinigte Fachverlage, ISSN 0343-3161 , Volume 30 (1980), Issue 5, pp. 403-405.
- Walter Listl: Light railways in Bavaria . 2nd Edition. Werne Verlag, Kiel 1989 (the chapter online: Deutsche Bundespost, Bahnpostamt, 80335 Munich ).
- Christoph Weißenberger: Off for the nostalgic Post-U-Bahn. In: Münchner Merkur of February 2, 1987, p. 11.
- Günter E. Köhler, Claus Seelemann: Mail delivery with trams in southern Germany and Alsace-Lorraine . In: Society for German Postal History : Archive for German Postal History. ISSN 0003-8989 year 1988, issue 2, p. 5 ff.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Koehler, Seelemann: Mail transport
- ↑ a b c d Brandmaier: Post underground railway
- ↑ a b Gürlich 1969
- ↑ a b Listl, Railway Post Office
- ↑ Münchner Merkur: What the well drills from Munich Central Station do on platform 20/21 , January 15, 2019
- ↑ Weißenberger: Out for the nostalgic Post-U-Bahn
- ↑ Hans Waldburger: Zurich's Post-U-Bahn is no longer . In: Schweizer Eisenbahn-Revue 4/1980, p. 133
Coordinates: 48 ° 8 ′ 31.5 ″ N , 11 ° 33 ′ 22.1 ″ E