Bavarian Ludwig Railway
The Bavarian Ludwig Railway (Bayerische Ludwigseisenbahn or Ludwigsbahn) was the first steam-hauled railway opened in Germany. The Königlich privilegierte Ludwigs-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft ("Royal Privileged Ludwig Railway Company", later called the Ludwigs-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft) received a concession to build a railway from Nuremberg to Fürth in the state of Bavaria on 19 February 1834.
The first reports from England over the planning of railways attracted great attention in Germany, particularly in Bavaria, where the road between the important commercial cities of Nuremberg and Fürth was the busiest road connection in the kingdom. Bavarian interest was also stimulated by Friedrich List’s advocacy of an all-German railway system and the reports of Joseph von Baader, whom King Ludwig had sent to England to study railways. After a discussion of this topic in the first Bavarian parliament in 1825, it authorised the king to build an experimental railway in the Nymphenburg Palace park. As the king’s 1828 request for Franconian merchants to begin building a railway line led to no action, he turned his attention to his favourite project, the building of the Ludwig Canal between the Danube and the Main.
After railways had been operating in England for a few years, local businesspeople decided to build a railway line along the Nürnberg-Fürth road. On 14 May 1833 they founded the Gesellschaft zur Errichtung einer Eisenbahn mit Dampffahrt zwischen Nürnberg und Fürth ("company for the establishment of a steam railway between Nuremberg and Fürth") to develop the railway. Within six months the two main instigators from Nuremberg, the merchant and market chief, George Zacharias Platner, and the head of the poly-technical school, Johannes Scharrer, had successfully raised the planned share capital of 132,000 guilders. The proposed dividend of 12 2⁄3% was met with skepticism, although the company did, in fact, pay a dividend of 20% in 1836.
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