History of rail transport in Germany

German Railway history officially began with the opening of the steam-hauled Bavarian Ludwig Railway between Nuremberg and Fürth on 7 December 1835. This had been preceded by the opening of the horse-hauled Prince William Railway on 20 September 1831. The first long distance railway was the Leipzig-Dresden railway, completed on 7 April 1839.

The forerunner of the railway in Germany, as in England, was to be found mainly in association with the mining industry. Mine carts were used below ground for transportation, initially using wooden rails, and were steered either by a guide pin between the rails or by flanges on the wheels.

From 1787, a network of wagonways, about 30 kilometres long, was also built above ground for the coal mines of the Ruhr in order to streamline the daily transportation of coal to loading quays on the River Ruhr. But the railway network in the Ruhr was not utilized as public transport. Some of these tracks were already using iron rails - hence the German term for railway, Eisenbahn, which means "iron way". The Rauendahler Schiebeweg in Bochum (1787) and the Schlebusch-Harkorter Kohlenbahn (1829) are examples of railways from those early days that can still be seen today. From 1827-1836, a wagonway was also built in Austria and Bohemia from Budweis to Gmunden via Linz.

The railways in Germany were given a significant impetus by the development of the first working locomotives in England (by Richard Trevithick in 1804 and John Blenkinsop in 1812) and the opening of the first public railway, the , in 1825. In Germany, even before the first real railways opened, there were attempts to use locomotives for railway operations. For example, in 1815, Johann Friedrich Krigar built a copy of the Blenkinsop steam engine at the Royal Iron Foundry, Berlin, for Königshütte in Upper Silesia; and, in 1818, he built another locomotive for the 1.8-kilometre-long Friederiken-Schienenweg, a coal line near Geislautern in the Saarland, which had been converted in 1821 from wooden to iron rails. This engine worked, but failed to meet expectations due to its poor performance.

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Wikipedia