Tram Herne – Baukau – Recklinghausen

The municipalities of Baukau, Herne and Recklinghausen signed a contract on February 4, 1896 to build a tram on the route between their locations and founded the Herne-Baukau-Recklinghausen tram for this purpose .

On the route between these places, a horse-drawn bus line was operated from 1888 , which traveled this route four times a day. On February 26, 1898 , the meter-gauge tram between Recklinghausen Viehor and Herne Bahnhof was put into operation. After an extension to Recklinghausen Markt on November 1, 1903 and an extension to Recklinghausen Hauptbahnhof on February 3, 1905 , the line had a length of 9.1 kilometers. The railway carried between 2 and 3 million passengers annually on this route, making it one of the most efficient in the entire Ruhr area .

When the municipality of Baukau was incorporated into the city of Herne in 1908 , it also disappeared from the company name. Thus from 1908 the company was only called the Herne – Recklinghausen tram . In the years between 1908 and 1928 , the railway gave a total of almost 400 meters of route to the railways of the city of Recklinghausen or its successor, Vestische Kleinbahn GmbH . On June 2, 1923 , Vestische Kleinbahn GmbH took over management, but the company remained independent.

In the 1920s, the line was expanded to two tracks and a 10-minute cycle was introduced on the line. Some of the tracks already ran on their own track body. On October 28, 1939 , independence came to an end and the railway became the property of Vestischen Kleinbahn GmbH .

literature

• Dieter Höltge: Trams and light rail vehicles in Germany, Volume 4 Ruhr area . EK-Verlag, Freiburg i.Br. 1994, ISBN 3-8825-5334-0 .