Forest railway
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A forest railway is a means of rail transport that is used for forestry purposes, primarily the transport of felled wood to sawmills or train stations.
history
Before railroads were built, logs were preferably carried out of the forests over longer distances by means of wooden drifts . At a hermitage , the trunks were washed down into the valley with a controlled tidal wave. Since this type of transport was not without damage to the cargo, it was z. B. unsuitable for high-quality construction timber. Another way of transportation was (and still is) rafting. However, the water required for this was not always available.
Simple horse-drawn trams with wooden rails , as they were also used in mining, were laid out from the 18th century, with the invention of the steam locomotive and steel rails, they were soon also used in forestry. Due to the special conditions in forestry, as with field railways , narrow-gauge railways were preferred : they allowed tight curve radii in difficult terrain, did not require any complex substructures and were transportable if required when it came to following the changing felling areas with the route . In particularly extensive regions, such as the north-west of the USA , extensive standard-gauge route networks were built exclusively for forestry purposes, for which special types of locomotives such as the Shay and Climax were also built developed.
The traction took place with different vehicles . In addition to steam locomotives and later locomotives with internal combustion engines , transport with draft animals also lasted until the end of the forest railways. Transport by gravity was also frequently encountered on simply equipped routes : loaded lorries ( trucks ) could roll down into the valley on tracks laid out with a constant gradient , lumberjacks drove on these - at risk of death - as brakes , the empty wagons were driven by work horses or by the Bring workers back to the starting point.
From the second half of the 20th century, forest railways were noticeably displaced by road vehicles; by the end of the 1960s they had practically completely disappeared in Western Europe , and forest roads were often laid on the routes .
In some Eastern European countries, forest railways have been able to last much longer, especially in Russia there are still some widely ramified route networks. Even in Hungary there are still some forest railways in active operation today, some of which also offer a tourist nostalgia train program. With a few exceptions, the numerous forest railway companies in Romania were shut down in the 1990s. In Western Europe , due to the early discontinuation, practically no routes have been preserved as museum railways.
Other ways of transporting materials
- Light railways for the transport of agricultural products
- Mine railways for mining ores
- Port railways for loading and unloading goods within a port company
- Halligbahnen for the transport of building materials for coastal protection.
- Army field railways and strategic railways for the transport of military goods and troops
- Debris railways for transporting debris after the Second World War
- Factory railways for the transport of materials in industrial plants
literature
- Manfred Hohn , Waldbahnen in Austria, Slezak publishing house 1989, ISBN 3-85416-148-4
- L. Reiner / H. Beiler / R. Sliwinski, Die Spiegelauer Waldbahn, Ohetaler Verlag Riedlhütte 2005, ISBN 3-937067-14-0
- Friedemann Tischer, The Muskau Forest Railway , Kenning Verlag, Nordhorn 2003, ISBN 3-933613-63-9
- Leo Hauska, Hugo Bruckmann: Forest railway construction and field railways . In: The forest civil engineering . tape 3 . Verlag von Carl Gerold's Sohn, Vienna 1937 ( tu-darmstadt.de [accessed June 7, 2017]).
