Wallersdorf–Münchshöfen railway

The Wallersdorf–Münchshofen railway was a metre gauge railway in the province of Lower Bavaria in southern Germany. It was operated from 1926 to the end of 1949 by the Wallersdorf and Country Narrow-Gauge Railway Cooperative (Kleinbahngenossenschaft Wallersdorf und Umgebung) whose head office was in Büchling. The line started from the station in the market town of Wallersdorf, in Dingolfing-Landau district, and ran to Münchshöfen in the municipality of Oberschneiding, in Straubing-Bogen district. The railway was exclusively used by goods trains.

The Lower Bavarian market town of Wallersdorf lies in the lower Isar valley, 20 kilometres from where the River Isar flows into the Danube near Plattling. Today the town is served by the electrified, single-tracked line from Landshut to Plattling (KBS 931). The station's former marshalling and loading yards − at kilometre post 52.9 – have been dismantled apart from a simple crossing loop for the current regional passenger and goods trains.

The construction of a standard gauge railway from Straubing to Landau an der Isar had been approved in 1869 and from 1872 onwards the Gäuboden communities, led by the town of Straubing, made persistent attempts to have it built, but these efforts remained unsuccessful. As a result, local farmers founded a cooperative to build a narrow-gauge line (Kleinbahn) with a junction on the Landau–Plattling railway. According to Zeitler, the cooperative was given approval to build the line by a Bavarian law passed on 26 June 1908; the authorised route running from the station in Wallersdorf via Büchling to Münchshöfen. On the largely flat valley of Gäuboden the railway was intended to supply the farmers with goods (fertiliser, coal and building materials) and especially during harvest to transport away produce, mainly sugar beet and cabbages, in a cost-effective manner. The German Empire and the Free State of Bavaria each contributed 90,000 Reichsmarks (RM) to the cooperative's capital investment of 187,000 RM. The remainder of the capital was raised from the participating communities and farmers.

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