Transport company district Osnabrück
Verkehrsgesellschaft Landkreis Osnabrück mbH | |
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Basic information | |
Company headquarters | Booed |
Web presence | www.vlo.de |
Reference year | 2010 |
owner | District of Osnabrück 100% |
Supervisory board | Reinhold Kassing (Chairman) |
Managing directors | Stephan Rolfes, Helmut Zimmermann |
Transport network | VOS |
Employee | 47 (2009) |
sales | EUR 3.5 million (2009) |
number of vehicles | |
Locomotives | 1 |
Railcar | 1 |
Omnibuses | 23 |
Operating facilities | |
Track length | 20.5 km |
The Verkehrsgesellschaft Landkreis Osnabrück GmbH , also known as VLO for short , is a transport company that operates passenger and freight transport by road and rail in the district and in the city of Osnabrück . The origin of the company is the Wittlager Kreisbahn AG , seat of the company is Bohmte .
history
The Wittlager circular path
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Course book section (DB) : | last 219g | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gauge : | 1435 mm ( standard gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In 1891 a railway construction association was founded with the aim of opening up what was then the Wittlage district in the province of Hanover with a branch line . After the Wittlage district together with the neighboring Lübbecke district , which was, however, in the province of Westphalia , made 750,000 gold marks available, the Wittlager Kreisbahn project took its course. The two districts founded the Wittlager Kreisbahn Aktiengesellschaft on March 4, 1898 together with the Prussian state, the city of Preußisch Oldendorf and other communities and private individuals . In 1899 the groundbreaking ceremony was carried out in Bad Essen .
The whole network
On August 9, 1900, rail traffic on the 20.5 km long, standard-gauge line from Bohmte - located on the Bremen – Osnabrück state railway - along the northern edge of the Wiehengebirge via Wittlage and Preußisch Oldendorf, where a locomotive shed with a workshop was built, to Holzhausen- Heddinghausen opened. At the beginning three steam locomotives were available.
On July 1, 1914, the line from Bohmte, where the railway administration was based, could be continued 20 km west to Damme in the Oldenburg Münsterland. There, the line of the Oldenburg State Railroad to Holdorf joined the Schusterbahn .
The railway line, on which some industrial companies settled due to the existing infrastructure, reached its longest stretch of 40 km from Damme station to Holzhausen-Heddinghausen station . In the Bohmte and Holzhausen-Heddinghausen stations there is a connection to the network of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the Deutsche Bahn AG . From November 1, 1949, most of the trains on the circular railway ran via Holzhausen-Heddinghausen, 5 km to Lübbecke .
After the Second World War
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/24/Autorail_in_Treignes.jpg/220px-Autorail_in_Treignes.jpg)
The increase in motorized individual transport and the associated decrease in the number of people to be transported could not be countered by purchasing more modern diesel multiple units. At the beginning of 1961, the management was transferred to the Bentheimer Eisenbahn , which fulfilled this task until the end of 1978. In 1964, 86.5% of the shares were in the hands of the State of Lower Saxony and the Wittlage district. On May 20, 1965 it was decided to convert the AG into a GmbH.
One then gradually began to shift passenger transport from rail to road. On September 29, 1962, passenger traffic came to an end on the section between Damme and Schwegermoor. The first bus service was established here in 1964 , and passenger trains were discontinued between Schwegermoor and Hunteburg from May 28, 1965. Passenger transport on the other routes was also completely discontinued on September 24, 1966, with the exception of a few school trains that ran until autumn 1971 . After that, the rail was only used for freight traffic. This, too, has been resting between Schwegermoor and Damme since May 17, 1963.
From Wittlager Kreisbahn GmbH to VLO
After the Wittlage district had risen in 1973 as part of the district reform in the Osnabrück district and the latter had also acquired the shares of the State of Lower Saxony in the GmbH - so a total of almost 88% - the Wittlager Kreisbahn GmbH was renamed VLO Verkehrsgesellschaft Landkreis Osnabrück GmbH in 1987 . With the name also changed the goal of the company, which today is involved in the planning, organization, implementation and promotion of local public transport in the district of Osnabrück.
Museum train
Museum railway trains have been running regularly on the Wittlager Kreisbahn route since 1973 . They have been carried out once a month by the Minden Museum Railway since 1977 , currently only between Bohmte and Preußisch Oldendorf or Offelten .
Verkehrsgesellschaft Landkreis Osnabrück GmbH
At the beginning of 1990 the VLO took over the management of the Ankum-Bersenbrücker Eisenbahn GmbH (ABE), in which the company has a 25 percent stake. The VLO has also held 74.6 percent of the Georgsmarienhütten-Eisenbahn since 2001. At the end of 2009, infrastructure and operations were separated by establishing VLO Bahn GmbH as a subsidiary , which acts as a railway company . Since then, the VLO has been a pure railway infrastructure company . The public passenger transport was established in early 2008 to the newly founded VLO Bus GmbH transferred by the Stadtwerke Osnabrück is operated.
The freight was discontinued at the end of 1996 between Prussian Oldendorf and Holzhausen-Heddinghausen, on 20 August 2004 and on the rest of the western section between Bohmte-Bruchheide and Schwegermoor. In 2009, 83,140 tons were still transported on the remaining piece, mainly south of Bohmte to the Wehrendorf canal port.
In 2000, the Eurobahn regularly ran the section Holzhausen-Heddinghausen - Preußisch Oldendorf with its railcars at short notice. These trips were carried out as empty trips. They were used for the transfer to the temporarily used workshop hall of the Minden Museum Railway in Preußisch Oldendorf during the construction period of the depot in Bielefeld-Sieker .
In the same year, the reactivation of the Haller Willem was given the green light. In 2000, the VLO leased the Osnabrück - Dissen-Bad Rothenfelde section from Deutsche Bahn for 30 years in order to be able to use this direct railway line between Osnabrück and Bielefeld again in the Lower Saxony part . Since June 12, 2005, trains have been running again on the shortest route between the two major cities along the Teutoburg Forest . The NordWestBahn was awarded the contract .
today
The VLO fleet now includes a diesel locomotive with 360 hp as well as a historic railcar and passenger wagons. There are also 21 VLO buses on the roads in the Osnabrück district.
Today, journeys with historical steam locomotives can be made on the tracks of the Wittlager Kreisbahn, and part of the freight traffic rolls over the rails in the old district.
The VLO acts as a railway company for the Minden Museum Railway and the Osnabrücker Dampflokfreunde e. V.
There are always discussions about continuing to operate the Wittlager Kreisbahn railway line. The section between Damme and Hunteburg has been closed for a long time; the sections between Bohmte and Hunteburg and between Offelten and Bad Holzhausen are no longer open to traffic. The section from Bohmte via Bad Essen to Preußisch Oldendorf was completely renovated in the 1980s and will probably be able to be used for a few more years. After the slump as a result of the financial crisis in 2010, the transport volume was increased again to over 100,000 tons.
Since 2014 there has been a working group made up of the Wittlager Kreisbahn initiative , the municipalities of Bad Essen, Bohmte, Ostercappeln , Preußisch Oldendorf and the planning company Nahverkehr Osnabrück with the aim of reactivating the Bohmte – Holzhausen route for passenger traffic. The section has been renovated since 2015, including a. the tracks are being reinforced and modernized. The Federal Railway Office , the federal government and the state of Lower Saxony are making large amounts of funding available on the basis of the SGFFG . For 2018 alone, an investment of 1.8 million euros came together. The previously closed section from Preußisch Oldendorf to Offelten has been accessible again since the end of 2017. The primary goal of the repair of the route is initially to restore the continuous connection for regular freight traffic between Bohmte and Bad Holzhausen from 2021.
literature
- Gerd Wolff: German small and private railways. Volume 9: Lower Saxony 1 . Eisenbahn-Kurier, Freiburg 2005, ISBN 3-88255-668-4 , p. 388-412 .
- Hans pigs foot, Friedel pigs foot, Bernhard Uhle: The Wittlager circular path. Traffic history in the area of the Wittlager Kreisbahn. Lübbecke: Uhle & Kleimann 1973. 100 years after the opening of the railway, Hans Schweinfuß and Bernhard Uhle published the Erw. u. revised Edition 2004 by the same publisher, ISBN 3-928959-28-X .
Web links
- Homepage of the VLO
- List of the existing railway vehicles of the VLO
- Track remains of the Wittlager Kreisbahn at the Schwegermoor peat plant
- Early documents and newspaper articles on Wittlager Kreisbahn AG in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d , VLO Verkehrsgesellschaft Landkreis Osnabrück GmbH, annual financial statements for the financial year from January 1 , 2009 to December 31, 2009 , in: Bundesanzeiger , March 31, 2010
- ^ Overview of Wittlager Kreisbahn. In: Website of the Minden Museum Railway. Museum Railway Minden e. V., accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ↑ Rolf Löttgers: The narrow-gauge railway time in color . Franckh'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-440-05235-4 , p. 31 .
- ^ Preuss timetable. Oldendorf. In: Website of the Minden Museum Railway. Museum Railway Minden e. V., accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Stefan Högemann: The current railway operation at the Verkehrsgesellschaft Landkreis Osnabrück (VLO), in: Bahn-Report 1/2012, S. 81ff
- ↑ "T3" is back again: On the way on the tracks of the Wittlager Kreisbahn. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper . Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung GmbH & Co. KG, July 23, 2013, accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ^ Initiative Wittlager Kreisbahn: Passenger trains between Bohmte and Bad Holzhausen? In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung GmbH & Co. KG, July 24, 2014, accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ↑ Sandra Spieker: Bahn proponents take another attempt. In: New Westphalian . Newspaper publisher Neue Westfälische GmbH & Co. KG, November 17, 2015, accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ^ Rainer Westendorf: Between Bohmte and Holzhausen: Funding for the renovation of the Wittlager Kreisbahn. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung GmbH & Co. KG, July 29, 2015, accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ↑ Karin Kemper: Start of construction in February 2018: Wittlager Kreisbahn is investing 1.8 million euros. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung GmbH & Co. KG, January 15, 2018, accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ↑ Joern Spreen-Ledebur: Museum train runs again. In: New Westphalian. Newspaper publisher Neue Westfälische GmbH & Co. KG, May 11, 2018, accessed on March 15, 2019 .
- ^ Kai Wessel: The route between Preußisch Oldendorf and Bad Holzhausen is to be renovated: The comeback of a railway line. In: Westfalen-Blatt . Westfalen-Blatt Vereinigte Zeitungsverlage GmbH, December 13, 2019, accessed on March 5, 2020 .