The Stuttgart–Horb railway is a 67.227 kilometer-long railway in the southern part of the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, running from Stuttgart to Horb. It forms part of a railway known as the Gäubahn () or Gäu Railway. The Royal Württemberg State Railways (Königlich Württembergischen Staats-Eisenbahnen or K.W.St.E.) and the Baden State Railways (Badische Staatseisenbahnen) constructed the majority of this line between the years 1866 and 1879. Today the partially single-track, fully electrified line features the high-speed Intercity-Express (ICE) service, with its tilting train technology, traveling from Stuttgart to Zürich. In addition, a multitude of local train services of numerous railway companies are on offer. The Gäu Railway is also a significant line in the North-South freight service system.
Route details
The Stuttgart–Horb railway steadily ascends from Stuttgart Hbf in a continuous loop around the city centre, which, due to its superb views of the basin of the Stuttgart valley, lent the name "Panoramabahn" to this section, and counts as one of the most beautiful city centre railways in Germany. From the city it heads in a southwesterly direction, and runs alongside the nature park Schönbuch between Böblingen und Herrenberg. From there, the Gäubahn runs through the eponymous Gäu to Eutingen. The route then descends into the Neckar valley as far as Horb and touches the eastern foothills of the Black Forest.
The Stuttgart–Horb railway is a main line railway, 67.2 kilometres in length. The entire line is electrified and is constructed to be used by the ICE tilting train technology. The line features twin tracks between Stuttgart and Horb and has a total of four tracks between the stations Stuttgart-Österfeld and Stuttgart-Rohr, a 3.5-kilometer-long section.
The line crosses three districts of the state of Baden-Württemberg and is part of three public transport associations. In the Stuttgart area, and in the district of Böblingen, namely between Stuttgart Hbf and Bondorf, the line is part of the transport-and-tariff association Stuttgart (Verkehrs- und Tarifverbund Stuttgart (VVS)). The station in Ergenzingen is the only station in the district of Tübingen, and is part of the Neckar-Alb-Donau transport association (Verkehrsverbund Neckar-Alb-Donau (NALDO)). Between Eutingen and Horb, the line traverses the district of Freudenstadt, and its transport association (Verkehrs-Gemeinschaft Landkreis Freudenstadt (VGS)).
History
Construction of the Eutingen–Horb section (1874)
Württemberg completed the section from Eutingen to connect to the Upper Neckar Railway (Obere Neckarbahn) in Horb on 1 June 1874. However, the aim was not to connect Horb via the Gäu and Böblingen to Stuttgart. Rather, the Royal Württemberg State Railways established the Nagold Valley Railway, a connection between Pforzheim and Horb, the completion of which made Horb a railway junction in 1874. However, the Royal Württemberg State Railways initially did not attempt to build a much shorter direct connection from Stuttgart to Horb because the gradients seemed too difficult to overcome.
Construction of the Stuttgart–Eutingen section (1879)
On 22 March 1873, the state of Württemberg legislated the creation of a railway between Stuttgart, via Herrenberg and Eutingen, to Freudenstadt, closing the gap between Stuttgart and Eutingen. In the discussions prior to the passage of this law, the term Gäubahn was used for the first time to label the section Stuttgart–Freudenstadt, and the term would later become the name for the entire line between Stuttgart and Singen. In November of the same year, construction on the technically challenging railway began in Stuttgart, led by the Württemberg engineer Georg Morlok. The route on the hillside was complicated, it required inclines of up to 1:52, bank engines in front and behind trains to Stuttgart-West, a large number of tunnels and deep cuts, the 430 metre-long and 39 metre-high Vogelsang embankment and the 42 metre-high Ziegelklingen embankment. A total of 1,600,000 cubic metres of earth were moved. The section to Vaihingen was the most expensive of the entire route, which cost a total of 31 million marks.
Much of the labour recruited by Morlok came from Italy. Construction went well: During the winter 1877/78, the line had already reached Herrenberg. On 20 August 1879, after a trial run from Stuttgart to Freudenstadt, the Royal Württemberg State Railways officially opened this section on 2 September 1879, in the presence of Georg Morlok, the president of Württemberg Hermann von Mittnacht, the mayor of Stuttgart Gottlob Friedrich von Hack, and many other dignitaries. The construction of this section shortened the distance between Stuttgart via Horb and Tuttlingen to Immendingen by 35 kilometers, and cut the trip time by 1 to 2 hours.
From regional to long-distance railway (1879–1919) The Stuttgart–Horb–Tuttlingen–Immendingen line was primarily of regional significance at this time. The terminus of all long-distance travel was Immendingen. By the end of the 19th century trip times were becoming quite a bit shorter, to the point where the trip between Tuttlingen and Stuttgart had been cut down to only 3 hours in 1897, 4 to 5 hours less than in the 1870s. Starting in 1900, 3 daily express long-distance trains traversed the line. Around the turn of the century, the Royal Württemberg State Railways mostly used the steam locomotives of the class Württemberg AD for their express service, which were in turn replaced by the class Württemberg C during World War I. The class Württemberg T 5 was used for regional service. Possibly the most famous passenger on this line, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, travelled from Zürich via Stuttgart to Petrograd in a special train on 9 April 1917.
The Royal Württemberg State Railways started to lay a second track alongside the originally single-track railway on short sections of the line in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1886, the first section to be made into a twin-track line was the 4.4-kilometer-long piece between Horb am Neckar and Eutingen im Gäu. In 1895, the 8.6-kilometer-long section between Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof and Stuttgart West received a second track and this was as extended as far as Böblingen from 22 November 1905.
The 1.2-kilometer connecting curve between Stuttgart North (Nordbahnhof) and the Stuttgart–Horb railway was opened on 1 November 1895. An initially planned connection line between Zuffenhausen and Stuttgart West was not realised. Traffic between Stuttgart and Böblingen increased from 16 trains (1890/91) to 32 trains in the winter of 1902/03.
In the period between World War I and World War II, the transport infrastructure in Germany received numerous improvements. On 22 October 1922, the new main station in Stuttgart (Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof) was officially opened. This removed the chokepoint at the terminus of the line and enabled the expansion of the capacity of rail traffic. Deutsche Reichsbahn altered the route taken by the line in the centre of Stuttgart to Eckartshaldenweg, avoiding Stuttgart North station, in autumn 1922.
In the 1920s, the Free People's State of Württemberg, as Württemberg was known during the Weimar Republic, undertook to expand the single-track lines constructed in the 19th century. The goal was to enable rail traffic from Berlin to Switzerland and Italy to utilise not just the railways in the neighbouring territories of Baden and Bavaria, but also the tracks owned by Württemberg. In addition, the Reichswehr had an interest in a high-capacity rail connection between Berlin and the southwestern border, which, particularly after the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1918, was not as close to the French border as the Rhine Valley Railway from Mannheim to Basel, and would not be as easy to disrupt in the event of war. The occupation of the city of Offenburg by French troops in 1923 reinforced the desire for an effective and efficient alternative route.
As part of the expansion of the line, the Reichsbahn also expanded Horb am Neckar station, and replaced the old Eutingen station building with a large new building.
The expansions during the 1920s and 1930s resulted in great improvements in the service schedule on the Gäubahn. Express trains travelled from Berlin via Erfurt, Würzburg, Stuttgart, Zürich, and Milan all the way to Rome. The last peacetime schedule in 1939 showed 3 express trains from Berlin to Italy, even though not all of the trains continued from Milan to Rome. In addition there was express service between Berlin and Lucerne as well as between Stuttgart and Konstanz. Travel time between Stuttgart and Singen was cut to 2 hours and 41 minutes in 1933, and the regional and local service schedules also saw marked improvements.
As was true prior to the railway expansion, and since World War I, the Württemberg class C steam locomotives were used in express service. After the construction of the connecting curve from Tuttlingen to Hattingen, the Prussian P 10 which assumed the lead on these trains. The Württemberg class C was reassigned to manage the regional and local service traffic. The class Württemberg T 5 was also still seen, but was replaced by 1933 by the DRG Class 24. The Prussian P 8 had already been used since 1920 between Horb and Immendingen. For freight service, the Prussian G 12 as well as the Württemberg K were used. Starting in 1924, the Reichsbahn began to assign the Prussian G 10 to short-distance freight service, and between 1936 and 1938, the DRG Class 86 saw use in the same capacity.
During World War II, passenger service was reduced in favour of the rather more significant freight traffic. Axis partner Italy received coal shipments from Upper Silesia using freight trains on the line. It lost much of its military freight significance in the North-South corridor with the German attack on the Soviet Union, and many of the newer locomotives, especially the Prussian P 10, were relocated by the Reichsbahn to eastern Europe, while passenger trains on the line again saw the use of the Württemberg C locomotive.
War damage, dismantlement and diesel operation (1945–1962)
Until February 1945, the Gäubahn did not suffer much damage during World War II, with the exception of aerial bombardment in 1944/45, which caused severe damage to the stations in Herrenberg and Horb am Neckar. This damage only disrupted traffic in the short term. More significant was the damage caused by German troops in April 1945, when several bridges were blown up between Stuttgart and Böblingen, stopping train traffic altogether shortly before the end of the war. Also in April 1945, American and French troops occupied southwestern Germany, which meant that the section of the line between Bondorf and Stuttgart fell into the American zone of occupation, while the section between Ergenzingen and Horb was assigned to the French zone. It was not until 13 August 1946 that the railway was opened again for through traffic.
France insisted on its right to reparations, unlike the United States of America, and in 1946 dismantled the second track between Horb and Tuttlingen, which had only been laid a few years before. Ever since, the Gäubahn is twin-tracked only between Stuttgart and Horb, as well as between Hattingen and Singen. The border between the American and French zones was responsible for the lack of through-traffic between Stuttgart and Singen, which did not resume until 1948. Compared to the heyday of the line at the end of the 1930s, the service schedule was severely reduced, and did not reach the same level as before the war until the end of the 1950s. The service to and from Berlin, for which the line had been expanded in the time between the wars, was not resumed by the Deutsche Bundesbahn, and the traffic corridor Berlin–Erfurt–Würzburg–Stuttgart–Zürich had lost its significance due to the separation of East Germany and West Germany.