West car
Westwaggon was a German manufacturer of wagons , railcars and trams . The full name was "Vereinigte Westdeutsche Waggonfabriken". The term West Wagon was chosen as a general short name .
history
After the First World War, the sales market for German railway manufacturers shrank significantly. On the one hand, this was due to the economic crisis in Germany and, on the other hand, the decline in exports . So it came to the merger of some manufacturers.
Van der Zypen & Charlier
Van der Zypen & Charlier in Cologne-Deutz was the name of a wagon construction company that had existed since 1845. Founders were the entrepreneurs Albert Charlier (1814-1894) and Ferdinand van der Zypen (1816-1863). Albert Charlier was a merchant who ran an express delivery service from Belgium to Cologne and further south. Ferdinand van der Zypen ran a workshop for stagecoaches in Liège . Both companies were threatened in their existence by the competition of the railroad, so that a merger was worthwhile. Van der Zypen's sons Julius (1842–1907) and Eugen (1843–1910) continued to run the company after his death.
The company was involved in many pioneering developments in electric rail vehicles :
- Before 1894, a monorail overhead test track was built on the factory premises based on a design by Eugen Langen according to Eugen Langen's "first basic form", in which the vehicle hangs on the axle of a wheel set , the two wheels of which run on rails within a box-shaped carrier rather resembles the system of the H-Bahn . Albert Charlier demonstrated Langen's “second basic form” with his “suspension bicycle” constructed in 1895. Eugen Langen's "second basic form" prevailed on the Wuppertal suspension railway , whose cars were also built by Van der Zypen.
- Construction of the first all-steel passenger coaches for the Gotthard Railway in 1896
- Together with other well-known companies, in 1899 it became a co-partner of the Study Society for Electric Rapid Railways (St.ES) and supplied the railcars for the high-speed tests, which were equipped with three-phase drives by AEG and Siemens . They each reached speeds of over 200 km / h.
- Van der Zypen & Charlier built the first vehicles for the Berlin subway in 1902.
- The King of Siam Chulalongkorn traveled in 1904 in a saloon car that was "royally furnished" by van der Zypen & Charlier.
- Around 1910 Van der Zypen & Charlier started manufacturing pressed sheet metal parts (including for freight car bogies) in their own factory.
- The company also built the first electric multiple units for the Hamburg-Altonaer Stadt- und Vorortbahn (which would later be referred to as the DR series ET 99 ), the Hamburg S-Bahn in 1906.
- In 1922 the company supplied a test car for the later electrically operated Berlin S-Bahn .
- Next were vehicles for numerous street railway companies built.
The company also built combustion railcars for private railways , such as the VT 114 (built in 1925) for the Verden-Walsroder Railway . 1925 was a truck - prototype with BMW -Motor, but mass production did not exist.
West car
.jpg)
With the help of Deutsche Bank AG , Van der Zypen & Charlier took over the much smaller companies Killing & Sohn in Hagen and Düsseldorfer Eisenbahnbedarf (formerly Carl Weyer & Co.) in Düsseldorf after the "Eislieg" ( Eisenbahn-Liefergemeinschaft GmbH) was dissolved in 1927/28 . The company name was changed to Vereinigte Westdeutsche Waggonfabriken AG (Westwaggon).
In 1928 the Gastell brothers' wagon factory was added in Mainz-Mombach . In 1930, the Fuchs wagon factory in Heidelberg was taken over for almost a decade , but it was later sold on. After the takeover of Gastell in Mainz , the production facilities in Hagen and Düsseldorf were closed; Westwaggon now produced in Cologne and Mainz.
In 1951 there was close cooperation with the Cologne-based engine, commercial vehicle and locomotive builder Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz AG (KHD), although there had been closer ties between van der Zypen and Deutz well before that: Eugen Langen , co-founder of Deutz Motorenwerke , was an engineer and co-owner at van der Zypen at the same time . In the following years, KHD increased its shareholding in Westwaggon and in 1959 Westwaggon was completely taken over by KHD. The production of rail vehicles under the name Westwaggon was then stopped.
Some outstanding constructions of the Westwaggon:
- A further construction in tram construction from the 1930s to 1950s was the three-axle steering frame . This made it possible to build longer vehicles than the two-axle vehicles customary at the time, but the relatively heavy bogies of a four-axle vehicle could be dispensed with.
- In 1938 a diesel-powered, lightweight express rail car was built based on a design by Franz Kruckenberg . It reached speeds of 215 km / h on test drives , but the Second World War prevented further development.
- From 1948/50, Westwaggon developed the Minden-Deutz design passenger coach bogies in cooperation with the Minden Central Railway Authority .
- In 1956 Westwaggon delivered eight class Z 200 double multiple units to the Luxembourg state railways CFL. Until 1994 the vehicles were retired from the CFL.
Klöckner Humboldt Deutz (KHD)
The takeover of the West wagon led to a transfer of production within the KHD Group: The wagon and locomotive was moved completely to Cologne, while in Mainz from now on the buses of Magirus-Deutz were built. With the production facilities in Cologne, KHD was now able to switch to the construction of large diesel locomotives . Until then, only smaller locomotives were built for field and mine railways or shunting operations .
Due to the closure of many tram companies and the great success of the competing DÜWAG in the 1950s and 1960s, the production of tram vehicles was discontinued in 1964, although Westwaggon was still the second largest German manufacturer in the 1950s. In 1970, the production of locomotives also ended.
The silver-colored electric light railcars of the Cologne-Bonn Railways (KBE) were also known from KHD . They drove as " silver arrows " on the banks of the Rhine railway in the 1960s faster from Cologne to Bonn as the trains of the Federal Railways . Their prototype was still delivered by KHD in 1960, the series vehicles put into service from 1964 had to be manufactured by the Donauwörth wagon factory .
In addition there were freight and passenger cars , diesel railcars , underground - car for Berlin and Hamburg and numerous trams, mainly to companies in the Rhineland , the Ruhr region were delivered and Mainz.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The company Van der Zypen Deutz ( Memento of the original of April 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Ulrich S. Soénius (Ed.), Jürgen Wilhelm (Ed.): Kölner Personen-Lexikon. Greven, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-7743-0400-0 , p. 599.
- ↑ S. (vmtl. E. Schrödter): The Langensche suspension railway . In: Association of German Ironworkers (Ed.): Steel and iron . Journal for the German iron and steel industry. Volume 14, No. 6 . A. Bagel, Düsseldorf March 15, 1894, p. 245–250 : “The suspension railway system Langen offers two basic forms, the double-rail and the single-rail. In the two-rail arrangement, the track consists of a box-shaped longitudinal girder, preferably made in latticework, open at the bottom, which is supported by columns or supports arranged at appropriate intervals, and the rails are fastened to the lower inner straps of the side walls of the box girder. On the axles of the wheels running on these rails, bogies are suspended by means of articulated members, and the actual carriage hangs under these bogies in springs. In the single-rail basic form, the rail itself is designed like a carrier and is gripped laterally by the support. The suspension elements are expanded to form brackets, which encompass the running wheels from above and bear the bearing points of the axles on both sides. The safety seems to be guaranteed to an even greater extent here than with two rails. Of course the running wheels of this track have a flange on each side. "
- ^ Monorails Society: Technical Page-Wuppertal . In: monorails.org . 2009. Retrieved January 18, 2014.
- ^ [SN]: Iron passenger carriages . In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung . tape 68 , no. 7 , August 12, 1916, p. 74 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-33054 ( e-periodica.ch [accessed June 30, 2019]).
- ↑ Weiler, Luis: Beginning of the railroad in Thailand; Bangkok 1979, p. 126
- ↑ Van der Zypen & Charlier: Catalog of the department for tank cars, pot cars and special cars (approx. 1920, reprint) . Ed .: North German Local and Rail Transport Archive / Friends of the Railway. Ahrensburg 2015, p. 4 .
- ↑ Rolf Löttgers: The narrow-gauge railway time in color . Franckh'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-440-05235-4 , p. 87 .
