Reich Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen

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The Reichsbahndirektion Ludwigshafen was a directorate of the Deutsche Reichsbahn , which existed from July 6, 1922 to April 1, 1937 and which included all railway lines within the Palatinate . Emerging from the Palatinate Railways nationalized in 1909 , it then formed the Royal Bavarian Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen am Rhein of the Bavarian State Railways . After changing its name twice, it was constituted as the directorate of the Deutsche Reichsbahn, founded in 1920, in 1922. From 1936 it was gradually dissolved. Her area of ​​responsibility was divided between the directorates in Karlsruhe, Mainz and Saarbrücken.

history

precursor

Palatinate Railways

The later Reichsbahndirektion Ludwigshafen has its origins in the Palatinate Railways , which was founded on January 1, 1870 from the merger of the Palatinate Ludwig Railway Company , the Palatinate Maximilians Railway Company , the Palatinate Northern Railway Company and the Neustadt-Dürkheim Railway Company . The first three mentioned retained their independence. A management building was built in Ludwigshafen am Rhein between 1870 and 1873. The abbreviated Pfalzbahn company operated the entire rail network of the Palatinate . Only along the Glantalbahn, which was built between 1896 and 1904, was it responsible for sections outside of the Palatinate in places due to the irregular border between Bavaria and Prussia in the middle and lower Glan Valley.

In the almost four decades that followed, it was the largest private railway company within the German Reich at the time . The reason for this was that the Bavarian state initially had no interest in a state railway company. Nevertheless, he reserved a long-term nationalization of his railway network on the left bank of the Rhine.

Royal Bavarian Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen am Rhein

On January 1, 1909, the company finally became the property of the Bavarian State Railways . The former Pfalzbahn functioned from then on as the Royal Bavarian Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen am Rhein .

In the period that followed, only a few routes were opened. On January 23, 1909 - a few days after the nationalization - the Elmsteiner Thalbahn Lambrecht - Elmstein was released . In 1911, the branch line to Otterberg , which was used exclusively for goods traffic in the first few years, as well as the Wieslauterbahn Hinterweidenthal Ost - Bundenthal-Rumbach and the extension of the narrow-gauge Ludwigshafen-Dannstadt to Meckenheim were added. The largest railway project during this time was the decades-long requirement for the completion of the Biebermühlbahn Kaiserslautern - Pirmasens , which was partially opened in 1875 and 1904 and took place in 1913. The Hornbachbahn Zweibrücken –Brenschelbach was built in two stages in 1913 and 1916 and the Lampertsmühle-Otterbach –Reichenbach Bachbahn in 1914 and 1920 . The former was originally intended as a strategic route to Bitsch in Lorraine , but the outcome of the First World War , which also resulted in Alsace-Lorraine being returned to France, prevented this measure.

As a further consequence of the war and the abolition of the monarchy, from December 1918 the name was only Bavarian Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen am Rhein and from May 1920 Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen (Rhine) . On March 10, 1920, it also ceded its western route network, which was part of the newly created Saar area. The Homburg – Neunkirchen railway and parts of the Mannheim – Saarbrücken , Homburg – Zweibrücken , Landau – Rohrbach , Bliestalbahn , Glantalbahn and Hornbachbahn lines were affected .

Reich Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen

First years

The constitution as Reichsbahndirektion Ludwigshafen took place on July 6, 1922. Railway depots were located in Kaiserslautern , Ludwigshafen , Neustadt , Zweibrücken and Landau . Wilhelm Lieberich became its president . Already in the following year she had to cope with a first major challenge in the form of the government operation carried out by the latter as a result of the French occupation . Lieberich refused to provide wagons for the transport of coal to France. On March 3, 1923, Ferdinand Happ became the new president after Liebrich had retired. France arranged for the Palatinate railway personnel to be expelled, which is why the management initially moved to Heidelberg , and in early 1924 to Mannheim. In January 1925 the management was back in Ludwigshafen.

Since the expansion of the railway network had largely come to a standstill by this time, only a few routes were opened during this time under the direction of the Ludwigshafen management. Work on extending the Eistalbahn Grünstadt - Eisenberg to Enkenbach began in 1922, but was delayed on the one hand by the French occupation and on the other by a regional economic crisis, so that the project was not completed until 1932. Another project was the extension of the Wieslauterbahn as far as Fischbach near Dahn , but this failed due to resistance from the Reich Treasury. Only the short-lived, narrow-gauge Wasgauwaldbahn emerged from these plans.

resolution

In the course of the reorganization of the Saar area, the management was gradually dissolved in the mid-1930s. With effect from May 1, 1936, she gave her West Palatinate route network to the Reichsbahndirektion Saarbrücken . On February 1, 1937, it ceded part of its area in the southeast to the Karlsruhe office, before the remainder of the Mainz directorate was incorporated on April 1 of that year. On July 31, 1937, the liquidation office of the former RBD Ludwigshafen - the last remaining part of the former management - was dissolved.

literature

  • Fritz Engbarth: From the Ludwig Railway to the Integral Timed Timetable - 160 Years of the Railway in the Palatinate (2007) . 2007 ( Online (PDF; 6.2 MB) [accessed December 14, 2013]).
  • Albert Mühl: The Pfalzbahn . 1st edition. Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-8062-0301-6 .
  • Heinz Sturm: The Palatinate Railways (= publications of the Palatinate Society for the Advancement of Science. Volume 53). New edition. pro MESSAGE, Ludwigshafen am Rhein 2005, ISBN 3-934845-26-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heinz Sturm: The Palatinate Railways . 2005, p. 223 .
  2. ↑ Hans-Joachim Emich, Rolf Becker: The railways to Glan and Lauter . 1996, p. 17th f .
  3. ^ Heinz Spielhoff: Locomotives of the Palatinate Railways. History of the Palatinate railways, express, passenger and freight locomotives, tender and narrow-gauge locomotives, multiple units . 2011, p. 19 .
  4. ^ Klaus Detlef Holzborn: Railway Reviere Pfalz . 1993, p. 8 .
  5. ^ Albert Mühl: The Pfalzbahn . 1982, p. 33 .
  6. ^ Albert Mühl: The Pfalzbahn . 1982, p. 39 f .
  7. ↑ bahnstatistik.de: Royal Bavarian Railway Directorate Ludwigshafen a. Rhine - Timeline: Establishments - Designations - Dissolutions . Retrieved December 14, 2013 .
  8. ^ Albert Mühl: The Pfalzbahn . 1982, p. 36 ff .
  9. ^ Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz (ed.): Official Gazette of the Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz of June 15, 1923, No. 10. Announcement No. 174, p. 107.
  10. ^ Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz (ed.): Official Gazette of the Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz of February 9, 1924, No. 6. Announcement No. 140, p. 85.
  11. ^ Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz (ed.): Official Gazette of the Reichsbahndirektion in Mainz of January 10, 1925, No. 2. Announcement No. 53, p. 23.
  12. ↑ schrankenposten.de: The history of the Eistalbahn Grünstadt - Enkenbach . Retrieved December 12, 2013 .
  13. ↑ Reiner Schedler: Secondary and narrow-gauge railways in Germany then and now . 1998, p. 5 f .
  14. ^ Albert Mühl: The Pfalzbahn . 1982, p. 40 . The listing of the corresponding stock can be found in: Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft (Hg.): Official Journal of the Reichsbahndirektion Mainz (special edition) of March 20, 1937, No. 15. Announcement No. 161, pp. 73-89.
  15. ↑ Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Official Gazette of the Reichsbahndirektion Mainz of July 10, 1937, No. 38. Announcement No. 454, p. 226.