Forbach tram

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The former Forbach tram connected the town of Forbach in Lorraine with the border towns on the Lorraine-Prussian border.

The small town of Forbach in the French department of Moselle belonged to the German realm of Alsace-Lorraine until 1919 . It had train connections through a main railway line to Metz since 1851 and to Saarbrücken since 1852 ; Express and express trains also stopped at the station every day.

history

When at the beginning of the 20th century the need arose to densify the rail network, the city of Forbach - with around 9,000 inhabitants at the time - initiated the construction of an electric tram by the Frankfurt company Felten & Guillaume- Lahmeyer. It led in a westerly direction across the Marienau district, where the depot was located, to Kleinrosseln (about six kilometers), where the terminus of a Völklingen tram line was across the border in Großrosseln .

To the east, the railway initially ran to Stieringen-Wendel (about three kilometers). Both sections were opened on March 31, 1911. The meter-gauge routes covered a total of 8.6 kilometers. The vehicle fleet at that time consisted of seven railcars and four sidecars, but was gradually increased to nine railcars and eight sidecars.

After the reintegration of the Lorraine district into the French Republic in 1919, the railway operated as "Tramways de la Ville de Forbach" (TVF). On June 8, 1930, the eastern route was extended to Goldenen Bremm, where the terminus of line 7 of the "Society for Tramways in the Saartal" had been across the border since 1929. When Lorraine was under German administration during the Second World War, the Reich Commissioner for the CdZ Lothringen ordered in the autumn of 1940 that the tram of the city of Forbach, which was regarded as a kind of suburb of Saarbrücken , should be taken over by the Saartalbahnen .

After a track connection had been established at the Goldenen Bremm , the "tram line E" started operating from Saarbrücken main station via Stieringen-Wendel to Forbach. This line received the number 11 from April 10, 1941. At the same time, a new line 12 ran from Saarbrücken Hauptbahnhof via Forbach to Klein Rosseln; However, from April 20, 1942, it was limited to the Forbach - Klein Rosseln section.

Due to the approach of the Allied troops, the tram service in Forbach had to be temporarily suspended on October 6, 1944 and finally on November 28, 1944. The war damage to the railway systems was so significant that the management on November 28, 1945? decided not to restore the tram but to replace it first with buses and later with a trolleybus .

On May 19, 1951, four VETRA trolleybuses began operating on the Klein-Rosseln – Forbach – Goldene Bremm line. The city of Völklingen also replaced its tram to Gross Rosseln on April 19, 1959 with a trolleybus line. Their final loop was on French territory. On June 4, 1967 the trolleybus operation ended here again. The Forbach trolleybus also stopped operating on November 1, 1969. Today eight city bus routes and one bus route to Saarbrücken operate in Forbach.

literature

  • Herbert Sommerfeld: Chronicle of the tram in Saarbrücken, in the tram magazine No. 34, Stuttgart, November 1979
  • Dieter Höltge: German trams and light rail vehicles - Volume 4: Rhineland-Palatinate / Saarland, Gifhorn 1981