Warsaw-Vienna Railway
The Warsaw-Vienna Railway (Polish: Kolej Warszawsko-Wiedeńska , also known as Warsaw-Vienna Railway (WWB)) was a railway company in Congress Poland , which was part of the Russian Empire . The main line ran from Warsaw to the then Austrian border at Sosnowiec and thus largely corresponds to today's line No. 1 (Warszawa – Katowice) of the Polish state railway PKP . It was the first long-distance railway of the Tsarist empire (only the short 27 km long route from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo was older). It formed the Russian-Polish part of the star of railway lines, which already in the middle of the 19th century connected Berlin , Vienna and Warsaw via what was then the triangle near Krakow.
From the beginning the line had European standard gauge of 1435 mm, an exception in the Tsarist Empire.
history
The project to connect Warsaw to the Austrian border by a railway line started in 1835. In 1839 a joint stock company was established for the construction of a railway line from Warsaw to Skierniewice. The company went bankrupt in 1842 and construction stopped. On July 4, 1843, the government of Congress Poland took over management of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway, and in 1844 work resumed. In November of that year, the first section from Warsaw to Pruszków was opened with a train ride for the Governor of Congress Poland. On June 14, 1845, the line to Grodzisk Mazowiecki was completed, on October 15 of the year to Skierniewice and Łowicz , on December 1, 1846 to Częstochowa and on April 1, 1848 to the station "Granica" (ie "border") in front of the Austrian border in the Maczki forest east of Sosnowiec . Finished in the same year the railway bridge over the former border river has been Biala Przemsza to the station Szczakowa at the put into operation on October 13, 1847 Krakow Upper Silesian Railway , which in Myslowice (Pol. Myslowice ) Following the Upper Silesian Railway to Wroclaw had. On September 1, 1848, this was connected to the Kaiser-Ferdinand-Nordbahn to Vienna via the Wilhelmsbahn from Kosel station in Kandrzin to Oderberg ( Bohumín ) . A connection from Trzebinia near Kraków via Austrian territory to the Northern Railway did not come about until 1856. The Vienna train station in Warsaw opened in 1845 and remained in operation until the 1920s.
Between 1859 and 1862 two direct connections to the Prussian railway network were established, from Sosnowitz to Kattowitz and from Aleksandrów Kujawski to Thorn . In 1866 a connecting line from Koluszki to Łódź was opened. From 1857 to 1912 the line was leased to the German-Belgian Warsaw-Wiener Eisenbahn AG .
The routes
- Main line
- Warsaw - Grodzisk Mazowiecki - Żyrardów (Ruda Guzowska) - Skierniewice - Koluszki - Piotrków Trybunalski - Radomsko - Częstochowa - Zawiercie - Ząbkowice - Strzemieszyce Południowe (both now part of Dąbrowa Górnicza ) - Austrian border
- Branch lines
- Skierniewice - Łowicz , where the cross-border connection to Thorn started in 1862/63 .
- Koluszki - Łódź
- Ząbkowice - Sosnowiec
The travel time for the 320 km long route between Warsaw and the border station in 1850 was 10 ½ hours for early trains with a lunch break, and 9 ½ hours for afternoon trains without a lunch break.
Locomotives
The first locomotives came from the Cockerill factory in Seraing , the following in the 19th century from Borsig , then from 1901 to the First World War from Russian production.
In the years 1898 and 1900, the Wiener Neustädter Lokomotivfabrik delivered 18 locomotives to the Warsaw-Vienna Railway, as they were previously supplied to the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn as type IId .
See also
Web links
- Roell, Encyclopedia of Railways, 1912, Warsaw-Vienna Railway
- Timeline of the history of the Warsaw – Vienna Railway (in Polish)
- Data list: track openings in the area of today's Poland
Granica passenger train station before the First World War
Granica station today as Sosnowiec Maczki
Railway bridge over the Biała Przemsza , formerly the Austro-Russian border river
