Innerste Valley Railway
| Innerste Valley Railway | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route number: | 204b | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Line number: | 1931 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Line length: | 33,4 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Track gauge: | 1435 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Innerste Valley Railway (German: Innerstetalbahn) was a railway line, that ran through the Upper Harz in Central Germany. It was also called the Upper Harz Railway or Harz Railway. It was built in order to enable the Magdeburg-Halberstadt Railway Company (Magdeburg-Halberstädter Eisenbahngesellschaft or MHE) to access the mines in the Harz mountains.
The Innerste Valley Railway was built between 1874 and 1914 and linked several formerly isolated mountain villages in the Upper Harz to the existing railway network in the northern Harz Foreland.
The railway was built in 1875 by the MHE from its marshalling yard at Vienenburg through Grauhof and Langelsheim to Lautenthal. Its original passenger services to Langelsheim on the Vienenburg–Langelsheim railway via Grauhof ended as early as 1884 and all traffic ceased in 1954; a direct line to Goslar being employed instead.
Until the cessation of regular services in 1976 the line branched off at Langelsheim station from the existing Neuekrug-Hahausen–Goslar railway and ran past the halt of Innerstetalsperre (before the construction of the dam there was a halt at Lindthal, now under water) to Lautenthal, from there through the Innerste valley via Wildemann, Silbernaal-Grund halt and Silberhütte station, later renamed Frankenscharrnhütte, to Clausthal-Zellerfeld. From 1914 trains were able to run from there to the terminus of Altenau passing through the station at Clausthal Ost.
There had been ideas about building such a line, important to the mining industry in the Upper Harz, for a long time. But the narrow Innerste valley posed major problems for a standard gauge railway. In 1874 the Magdeburg-Halberstadt Railway Company began work and bored a tunnel through the Gallenberg in Wildemann, which was finished in July 1875. Services to Clausthal started on 15 October 1877 and, in 1914, the line was extended to Altenau.
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Wikipedia