Ludwig's Western Railway

The Ludwig Western Railway (Ludwigs-West-Bahn) is a German railway line that was originally funded by the Kingdom of Bavaria. It runs from Bamberg via Würzburg to Aschaffenburg and on into the former 'Kurhessian' Hanau.

In the 1840s it was already clear that improvements to the navigation of inland waterways provided by the building of the canal between the rivers Main and Danube, fostered by King Ludwig I of Bavaria, had not triumphed over the railways. After the king had given up his opposition to a main railway line, parliament passed the law for the construction of Ludwig's Western Railway on 23 March 1846, the second main line to be built by the Royal Bavarian State Railways (Königlich Bayerische Staats-Eisenbahnen).

Operations were first begun on the Hanau–Aschaffenburg section by the Frankfurt-Hanau Railway (Frankfurt-Hanauer Eisenbahn) and transferred to the Hessian Ludwigsbahn from 1863. The latter also acquired ownership of the section now running through Prussia in 1872. In 1893 the Hessian Ludwigsbahn – and its ownership and running powers – were transferred to the Prussian state railways.

After delays due to the years of revolution around 1848, the route was able to be opened in sections from 1852.

The route runs from Bamberg, the junction with the Ludwig South-North Railway, to Schweinfurt, from Würzburg to Lohr and from Aschaffenburg to Kahl in the Main valley. From Schweinfurt to Würzburg it runs away from the loop in the Main, taking a short cut across the triangle of land formed by the Main over gently rolling hill country. Würzburg Hauptbahnhof (main station) was the terminus inside the fortified city until 1869. From Lohr to Aschaffenburg the railway line again takes a short cut away from the Main and crosses the Spessart highlands in a relatively straight line through a tunnel, following the course of the Laufach and Aschaff valleys. At the state border in Kahl it connects to a line opened by the Frankfurt-Hanau Railway on 22 June 1854, who operated the section from the border to Aschaffenburg as a leased railway. In this way Bavaria had linked the two important commercial cities of Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main with railway routes.

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