Spessartbahn
| Spessartbahn | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Former engine shed of the Spessart Railway in Bieber
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| Route length: | 21.2 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 900 mm ( narrow gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Maximum slope : | 2.5 ‰ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Minimum radius : | 50 m | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top speed: | 30 km / h | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Spessartbahn was a narrow-gauge railway in the Hessian North Spessart , also called the Biebertalbahn .
history
On July 1, 1882, the Bonn entrepreneur Dr. Heinrich Pfahl founded the Bieberer Gruben trade union in Bieber . He immediately pushed for a mine railway to be built in order to develop the mining field in a contemporary way. The route was laid in 1883, and in July 1884 the railway was licensed for 99 years as a mining railway under mining law with a track width of 900 millimeters . The line was opened on August 4, 1885, the construction costs amounted to 600,000 gold marks . In Gelnhausen there was only a bypass track and an unloading track, which led to a ramp from which the state railway cars were filled. In Lochborn there was also a bypass track and a connection to the opencast mine in Lochborn. In the first ten years there were no other train stations that had only been built with the opening of the Pesohnenverkehr.
As early as 1888 there were considerations to extend the line from Flörsbach via Kempfenbrunn and Frammersbach to Partenstein on the Ludwigs-West-Bahn . And a little later the Bavarian side expressed an interest in running the railway - with a change of gauge to standard gauge over the upper Kahlgrund , the Ludwigs-West-Bahn crossing at Hösbach through the Bessenbach valley and the Elsava valley to Kreuzwertheim (approx. 80 km). Both projects should primarily draw traffic from the forest . But that was probably not enough for a profitability calculation. The projects did not materialize.
In 1889 Dr. Heinrich Pfahl, Erlanger & Sons Metallgesellschaft Frankfurt and M. Cahn, Brussels Owners of the mine railway. Due to illness, Dr. Heinrich Pfahl on November 27, 1893 - retroactively to July 1, 1893 - transferred his rights to the mine and railway to Gustav Menne & Co. from Siegen . The new owner has now started negotiations with the district and the local communities to also take up passenger traffic on the train. For this purpose, the Spessartbahn AG was founded on August 28, 1895 with various major shareholders , including Gustav Menne & Co. - who also ran the business - and the Stern bank in Cologne . With the conversion into a railway of public transport also began on 15 December 1895 passenger traffic to Bieber, now a district of Biebergemünd . In the beginning, the second and third car classes were offered.
In the middle of the 1890s there was a plan to extend the line westwards via Gelnhausen to Hanau . The state and local authorities viewed this critically, however, as the line would have run largely parallel to the Kinzig Valley Railway and the Hanau Small Railway was built between Hanau and Langenselbold at that time . So the matter was not pursued.
From 1907, Friedrich Krupp AG from Essen had joined the stock corporation, which owned all the shares in 1909. The seat of the railway administration was first in Cologne, then in Bieber and was relocated to Weilburg in early 1909 . At the end of May 1925, the production of iron ore was stopped. Friedrich Krupp AG was no longer interested in the railway. On October 5, 1928, the three-kilometer-long, particularly unprofitable section of the Bieber - Lochborn section was abandoned and some of the tracks were dismantled. The district of Gelnhausen , to which the shares had been transferred on May 29, 1929, added the missing tracks back to Lochmühle in 1932 and expanded the operation - at times as a private connection railway for the forest administration - again to this end point.
Together with its three other railways, the Gelnhausen district works now also managed the Spessartbahn. It was not until April 1, 1937 that they were formally united in the local authority " Gelnhausen District Railways ", which already ran the routes
business. The volume of traffic on the Spessart Railway remained too low in terms of economy. Only the lack of other means of transport during and immediately after the Second World War enabled the Spessart Railway to survive. It came to an end on July 23, 1951, as soon as the situation had improved. The railway systems were sold to Klöckner-Werke AG in Duisburg for demolition for DM 300,000 .
course
The 21 km long single-track line began in Gelnhausen in Kinzig , where following the Kinzig Valley Railway , also called " Frankfurt-Bebraer railway called" the main route Frankfurt am Main - Fulda existed. Here was a loading track with a fall platform for ore loading. The district station, which was put into operation in 1929, had a common platform with the normal-gauge Freigerichter Kleinbahn, which also ended there .
From there, the Spessartbahn followed at some distance on the left bank of the Kinzig up the valley of today's federal road 40 , but on its own track, via Höchst , today a district of Gelnhausen. Tickets were available there at the “Zum Hirschen” inn. This was followed by Wirtheim (now part of Biebergemünd ), which was used as a transfer station to the state railway, although its station was about 500 meters away. This explains why some trains from the Biebertal only ran to Wirtheim. Then the railway turned in a south-easterly direction into the Spessart and followed the Biebertal . Mining has been going on there since the end of the 15th century . The route continued through today's districts of Biebergemünd (Besen-) Kassel , Roßbach and Bieber , from there on via Lochmühle to Lochborn. Lochborn station was at the end of the line in the Lochborn opencast mine. From here the Eisenstein was transported to the state railway in Gelnhausen. The Burgberg district could be reached via a siding. Another connection was made later to the Bremsberg.
The travel time for trains between Bieber and Gelnhausen was - depending on whether they were pure passenger trains or mixed trains (GmP) - between one and one and a half hours.
Naming
The name Biebertalbahn is used for two very different railway lines in Hesse , namely the
- Spessartbahn
- Biebertalbahn , which started from Giessen .
Todays situation
The reception building of the Lochmühle train station has been preserved and, as the “ Wilhelm Schäfer House”, was the branch of the “Research Station for Low Mountain Range” of the Senckenberg Research Institute for many years .
literature
- Ernst-Ludwig Hofmann a. Friedrich Zundel: The Spessart Railway . Biebergemünd-Bieber 1986. Reprint 2000.
- Reichsbahndirektion Frankfurt (Main): Guide over the lines of the district of the Reichsbahndirektion Frankfurt (Main) . Frankfurt 1926, 138f.
- Volker Rödel, Heinz Schomann: Railway in Hessen. Cultural monuments in Hessen. Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany , ed. from the State Office for Monument Preservation Hessen, Theiss Verlag Stuttgart, 2005, 3 volumes in a slipcase, 1,448 pages, ISBN 3-8062-1917-6 , vol. 2.2, p. 759f (route 064).
- Gerd Wolff and Andreas Christopher: German small and private railways - Volume 8: Hessen. Freiburg 2004, p. 126ff. ISBN 3-88255-667-6
Individual evidence
- ^ Jochen Fink: The Hanauer Kleinbahnen . Kenning & VGB, Nordhorn 2019. ISBN 978-3-944390-13-0 , p. 15.
- ↑ Figure: [1] ; in Rödel / Schomann the building was - probably by mistake - not recorded, see: Reinhard Dietrich : Book review: Railway in Hessen. In: New Magazine for Hanau History 2006, p. 205 (207).