Sissach-Gelterkinden railway
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The Sissach-Gelterkinden-Bahn ( SG ), also popularly known as Gelterkinderli , was a narrow-gauge tram in Switzerland . The train departed from 16th May 1891 to 7. January 1916 between the two Baselbieter municipalities Sissach and Gelterkinden .
The Hauenstein and Schafmatt lines were the two variants of the Basel - Mittelland rail link . The decision was made in favor of the Hauenstein route, which was opened in 1858. This meant that Gelterkinden had no direct connection to the network of the Swiss Central Railway (SCB), from which the municipality of the Upper Basel area was hoping for an economic upswing. So a committee was formed in Gelterkinden, which 30 years later, in 1888, was granted the concession for a single-track standard gauge line from Sissach to Gelterkinden. The SCB was commissioned with the construction. However, the latter refused to accept the order because they considered the maintenance of this branch line to be unprofitable.
In 1890 the Gelterkinder Committee contacted the Bernese construction company Pümpin & Herzog, Gesellschaft für Specialbahnen , which had just built the Basel – Flüh railway line . The plan was to build a narrow-gauge , electrically operated railway, the route of which was to be largely on the cantonal road for cost reasons . After the concession for the meter-gauge tram line had been granted, construction work could begin and the route opened on May 16, 1891 . The Sissach-Gelterkinden Railway was the second electric railway in Switzerland after the tram opened in Vevey in 1888 .
The electricity required was obtained from a specially built hydropower plant , which, in addition to the water from the Ergolz, also obtained that from the Homburgerbach. Because of the lack of water in the winter months, a steam locomotive had to be pulled in in 1893 . With the construction of the Hauenstein base line in 1912, which connected Gelterkinden to the transit line, the operation of the "Gelterkinderli", which anyway hardly generated any dividends, was called into question. From May 1914, only 3rd class cars were in service, in the late summer of 1915 electrical operations were discontinued and the copper wires for the electrical catenary were sold, taking advantage of the war-related rise in the price of copper. On January 7, 1916 , operations ceased and the company was liquidated.
In 2009, the Gelterkinden Transport and Improvement Association rebuilt a piece of track and catenary as a souvenir on the preserved own route. In 2011 a replica of a freight wagon was put on the rails. On July 30, 2016, a replica of the “SG No. 1 », the electric locomotive of the former Sissach-Gelterkinden railway company. It was inaugurated on Friday, September 2nd, 2016 in the presence of the “designers” and numerous guests and passers-by. The transport and the rerailing on the original route section took place on Saturday, July 30, 2016. Ernst Graf (grandson of the legendary SG conductor Gottlieb Graf), his son Markus, grandsons Simon and Florian, as well as Hanspeter Kottman, Fritz Schaub and Konrad Droll worked on a dilapidated chassis acquired from a collector in Kallnach in Freiburg for more than a thousand hours Works yard of the construction company Graf Söhne AG to a model of the historical SG tractor in scale one to one. Old plans and photographs of the former tractor were used as the basis.
literature
- Erich Buser, Friedrich Gysin and Eugen Schwarz: Sissach-Gelterkinden-Bahn 1891-1916 . Gelterkinder Anzeiger publishing house, Waldenburg and Gelterkinden, 1992 (out of print)
- Heinz Spinnler, Ambros Saladin, Christoph Berger: Eisenbahn Sissach – Gelterkinden , Eital-Verlag Tecknau, 2016, ISBN 978-3-033-05089-1
Web links
- Sissach-Gelterkinden-Bahn detailed fan page by Jürg Schneider
- Sissach - Gelterkinden Bahn (SG) In: discontinued-bahnen.ch by Jürg Ehrbar
- Article Sissach-Gelterkinden-Bahn by the Gelterkinden Transport and Improvement Association (VVG) in www.vuvg.ch
