The Lower Kochertal Railway was a standard-gauge private branch line of the Württemberg Railway Company (WEG) in northern Württemberg, Germany. It ran as a branch line from Bad Friedrichshall to Ohrnberg and followed the lower reaches of the Kocher.
With a length of , it was the longest route of the WEG. It was opened in two stages: on 15 September 1907, the railway reached Neuenstadt, and on 1 August 1913, it was extended to Ohrnberg. After the cessation of operations on 27 December 1993, the initially planned integration into the Heilbronn Stadtbahn network failed. The route is now passable as a cycle path.
History
Prehistory, planning, and construction In the era before the construction of the railway, Neuenstadt was located on the stagecoach route from Heilbronn via Mergentheim to Würzburg and was therefore well developed in terms of transport. With the continuous opening of the Stuttgart–Heilbronn–Würzburg line (today's Franconian Railway) in 1869, which ran from Jagstfeld in a northerly direction along the Jagst (Western Fork Railway), Neuenstadt was sidelined. The plans for the construction of the Heilbronn–Hall Kocher Railway, which opened in 1862 and were to run eastwards via Neckarsulm and the lower reaches of the Kocher, promised a remedy. However, the towns in the Weinsberg Valley and the city of Heilbronn succeeded i pushing through a more southerly route via Weinsberg, bypassing Neckarsulm and Neuenstadt, for which the complex construction of the Weinsberg Tunnel was accepted. The reason for Heilbronn was the plans of the Württemberg state for a Neckar port as a transshipment point between ship and rail in Neckarsulm so that Heilbronn as the region's sole transport hub saw its preeminence in danger.
After neither the connection via the Kocher Railway nor the Western Fork Railway was successful, the cities and municipalities petitioned in 1873 for the construction of a railway line in the lower Kocher Valley, but without success. 19 years later, on the occasion of the opening of the Waldenburg–Künzelsau Kocher Valley Railway on 1 October 1892, the Württemberg Prime Minister of Mittnacht held out the prospect of an extension of the line downstream of the Kocher. Citing this, the residents soon submitted a petition for further construction, but this was rejected by the Württemberg government concerning a lack of planning capacity and the heavy burden caused by the construction of main lines. The Kocher Valley Railway was not extended until 1924, but only to Forchtenberg.
While Heilbronn and Neckarsulm flourished due to industrialization and Jagstfeld developed into an important railway junction, the lack of transport connections in the lower Kocher valley led to a creeping depopulation. In Neuenstadt, trade and commerce shrank. The concession of private railway companies in Württemberg from the 1890s onwards brought new hope. On 15 April 1898, a railway committee was formed from Neuenstadt and the communities of Kochertürn, Degmarn, and Oedheim, which commissioned the Arthur Koppel company to carry out studies for a railway. Initial proposals to run the line from the Oberamtsstadt Neckarsulm or Kochendorf to the Kochertal did not meet with the approval of the four municipalities and the royal government, as a connection to the Jagstfeld railway junction (today Bad Friedrichshall Hauptbahnhof) seemed more convenient and thus more economical. The topographical conditions also spoke against Neckarsulm as a starting point.
On 18 December 1898, Koppel proposed a narrow-gauge railway with a gauge of 750 millimeters from Jagstfeld to Neuenstadt. On 25 January 1899, Koppel and the municipalities agreed on the exact route, the location of the stations, and other formalities. The municipalities had to make land available for the route free of charge and also pay a "one-off" subsidy of 50,000 marks per kilometer of rail. The towns then submitted the plans to the Württemberg government, which granted the concession for the construction of the narrow-gauge railway on 29 July 1899 and approved a state subsidy of 20,000 marks per kilometer of railway. This also motivated the municipalities along the Kocher between Neuenstadt and Künzelsau to request a gap closure to the Kocher Valley Railway Waldenburg–Künzelsau.
In the meantime, on 13 May 1899, the WEG with Koppel's representative Köhler as its first director broke away from the Arthur Koppel company. The WEG took over seven further construction and operating concessions for branch lines from Koppel throughout the country. It examined the existing plans and proposed an adjustment to standard gauge due to the favorable terrain conditions and the economic efficiency (freight wagons could be transported continuously). The municipalities agreed to this and with the new contract of 2 January 1901, committed themselves to bear the additional costs of 5000 marks per kilometer of railway. The state of Württemberg approved the project with its new concession of 25 July 1902. This now provided for a state subsidy of 28,000 marks per kilometre, but a maximum of 338,000 marks. The construction of the line had to be completed within four years.
At the end of 1904, construction work could be started from the west with the line through Jagstfeld and the Kocher bridge near . However, there were delays in the construction of the upper section: Since Neuenstadt and Bürg could not agree on the location of the terminus, demanded that the station be directly on the opposite side of the Kocher. Bürg terminated his support for the project. It was only when the other municipalities took over the outstanding amount that construction at the eastern end of the line could begin in 1906.
With a one-year delay compared to the state requirement, the construction work was completed in 1907. The construction proceeded without any major accidents; the construction costs amounted to 1.49 million marks. On 14 September 1907, the ceremonial inauguration of the Jagstfeld–Neuenstadt branch line finally took place. The following day, the WEG began regular operations.
Extension to Ohrnberg While the line was still being built to Neuenstadt, the WEG began planning for the extension of the line to Ohrnberg, after the communities of , , Möglingen, and Ohrnberg had petitioned for the extension of the line at the beginning of 1907. On 17 May 1910, Württemberg granted the WEG the concession for the construction and operation of the extension with a term until 1 November 2000, with a state subsidy of 30,000 marks per kilometer of railway. The neighboring municipalities undertook to contribute a total of 80,000 marks and to make land available free of charge.
On 1 November 1911, construction work began, which included the construction of two more bridges over the Kocher. The construction period extended over a year and a half until July 1913, and the construction costs amounted to 1.072 million marks. On 1 August 1913, the Neuenstadt–Ohrnberg section of the Lower Kocher Valley Railway was ceremoniously opened. The completion of the branch line network in the area of today's Heilbronn district was thus completed.
In 1924, the Deutsche Reichsbahn extended the Waldenburg–Künzelsau to Forchtenberg. The approximately 13-kilometre-long gap between Forchtenberg and Ohrnberg was not closed, although the 40th anniversary of the line to Ohrnberg was still debated in 1953. Plans for a continuation from Ohrnberg to Öhringen or Brettach–Bitzfeld–Bretzfeld also proved to be no longer feasible.
Further development (1912–1990)
After the opening, the traffic volume developed promisingly. Until the First World War, the railway transported around 120,000 people a year. Thanks to the economic upswing in the late 1920s, the volume of traffic increased to 350,000 people per year. Since necessary maintenance work on the line was not carried out due to the First World War and the crises in the 1920s, renovation could not be started until 1933.
During the Nazi era, a siding was set up in 1937 for the Oedheim military airfield at the level of today's Hirschfeldpark, which led about two kilometers in a south-easterly direction out of the Kocher valley. Towards the end of the Second World War, the line suffered severe damage, especially from low-flying attacks and bombings in the area of Bad Friedrichshall-Jagstfeld station, in which the station building was also destroyed. On November 8, 1944, a bomb hit the railway track near the Kocher Bridge near Bad Friedrichshall-Hagenbach, but operations could be continued for the time being. Only after the Wehrmacht blew up all three Kocher bridges on its retreat to the south on April 1, 1945, between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., was train traffic no longer possible.
In 1946, operations were resumed: on 15 August to Neuenstadt, on 23 September to Möglingen, and on 21 December to Ohrnberg. From 1944 until the end of the war, the wrecks of downed Allied aircraft were collected at the airfield, which was reached here via the siding. After the scrap yard was dissolved in 1948, the track became superfluous and was removed soon afterwards.
From 1951 to 1952, the Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB) built a new building for the destroyed station building of Bad Friedrichshall-Jagstfeld station. The building, which had been located on an island until it was destroyed, was replaced by a building on the eastern side of the Bundesbahn facilities, where the passenger train tracks of the WEG had previously been located. From this point on, the WEG also used the DB facilities for passenger transport.
The WEG was one of the first private railways in Germany to consistently switch from steam locomotives to diesel railcars to increase profitability. In 1956, for example, the brand-new diesel railcar T 06 replaced all three existing steam locomotives, which enabled a significant reduction in travel time. Nevertheless, passenger traffic declined continuously from the early 1950s onwards, not only due to the increase in individual traffic but also due to the bus line established by the WEG in 1949, which connected the lower Kocher Valley to Neckarsulm and Heilbronn with double-decker buses without the need to change trains and with a shorter travel time. In 1955, the newly founded WEG subsidiary WEG-Kraftverkehrs-GmbH (KVG) took over the bus operation.
The school transport to the new middle schools in Neuenstadt and Bad Friedrichshall, which was handled by rail, provided a base load in passenger transport but was not very profitable. Freight traffic developed ambivalently after the Second World War: new sidings to industrial plants in Bad Friedrichshall-Kochendorf and Neuenstadt caused a temporary increase. In the 1970s, freight traffic increased significantly in the autumn due to more efficient transport of sugar beet to Südzucker's plants, so that from about 1980 onwards, beet transport accounted for 85% of freight traffic in the last quarter of the year. The other volume of goods fell continuously.
From 1977 onwards, steam-hauled museum trains of the Eisenbahnfreunde Zollernbahn (EfZ) ran on several Sundays a year on the Lower Kocher Valley Railway. The neighboring communities celebrated the 75th anniversary of the line on 2 October 1982 with a ceremony in Neuenstadt, to which steam special trains of the Society for the Preservation of Rail Vehicles (GES) operated. Occasionally, museum steam locomotives were used in front of photo freight trains and as a scheduled steam service in beet traffic.
Light rail planning and decline