West German Railway Company
The West German Railway Company (WeEG) was founded in Cologne on December 12, 1895 as a counterpart to the East German Railway Company in Königsberg (ODEG). A bank consortium took over 90% of the share capital of 5 million marks.
The new company took the place of Lenz & Co GmbH in their construction and operational management contracts with the Bergheim, Euskirchen, Geilenkirchen and Gummersbach districts, but also carried out other railway constructions on their own. From a technical as well as a financial point of view, it has operated its business largely independently of Lenz since the late 1890s. The main workshop of the WeEG was in Liblar .
As the management company for its railways in Baden, WeEG founded the Badische Lokal-Eisenbahnen AG (BLEAG) together with Friedrich Lenz and three banks on October 27, 1898 and took a 30% stake in it. Subsequently, on December 31, 1896, it sold the following railways with a route length of around 100 kilometers to BLEAG:
- Branch lines Bruchsal – Odenheim and Ubstadt – Menzingen - opened on October 5, 1896
- Branch line Bühl – Oberbühlertal - opened on December 28, 1896
- Branch lines Karlsruhe – Ettlingen – Herrenalb , Busenbach – Pforzheim and Ettlingen West – Ettlingen Stadt (meter gauge, partly three-track ) - opened on December 1, 1897
First of all, the Moselle Railway should be mentioned among the new buildings in which the WeEG played a major role . It was the largest and most expensive property for which 20 million marks alone had to be spent on a route length of 100 kilometers, about three times what a train of the same length in the north German lowlands cost at that time.
Furthermore, the Mittelthurgau Railway is noteworthy because its route from Konstanz to Wil SG was almost exclusively in Switzerland . It remained with the AG for Transport (AGV) until 1950 and brought in the only income in a "hard" currency for the Lenz Group during the inflationary times after the two world wars.
The routes built by WeEG in 1899/1901 and transferred to Mödrath-Liblar-Brühler Eisenbahn AG, founded in 1903, were nationalized by the Kingdom of Prussia on January 1, 1913, together with the railway belonging to the Bergheim district.
Thereafter, the WeEG's sphere of influence in 1915 included:
- 457.8 km of small railways in Prussia (1919 still 355 km)
- 140.1 km branch lines in Prussia
- 280.5 km branch lines in Württemberg
- 42.0 km of branch lines in Switzerland
This 920.4 km total length was divided up
- 176.8 km of leased railways and
- 743.6 km of railways in which the WeEG was involved.
In the years 1925 to 1927, the AG for Transport acquired not only the majority of the capital in the Württemberg branch line and the Mosel line, but also 90% of the shares in the West German Railway Company.
This merged on January 1, 1928 with the AGV. The Vereinigte Kleinbahnen AG continued to carry out some of the tasks of the WeEG within the AGV group .
literature
- Henning Wall: The Geilenkirchener Kreisbahn . Schweers & Wall: Aachen 1987, pp. 14-20 ISBN 3-921679-70-2
- Wolfram Bäumer, Wolf-Dietger Machel : Friedrich Lenz: A Pioneer of Regionalization , in: The Museum Railway; Issue 2/1987 and 3/1987, pp. 24–33. ISSN 0936-4609