Bavarian Ludwig Railway

Background

The first reports from England over the planning of railways attracted great attention in Germany, particularly in Bavaria, where the road between the important commercial cities of Nuremberg and Fürth was the busiest road connection in the kingdom. Bavarian interest was also stimulated by Friedrich List’s advocacy of an all-German railway system and the reports of Joseph von Baader, whom King Ludwig had sent to England to study railways. After a discussion of this topic in the Bavarian parliament in 1825, it authorised the king to build an experimental railway in the Nymphenburg Palace park. As the king’s 1828 request for Franconian merchants to begin building a railway line led to no action, he turned his attention to his favourite project, the building of the Ludwig Canal between the Danube and the Main.

Establishment

After railways had been operating in England for a few years, local businesspeople decided to build a railway line along the Nürnberg-Fürth road. On 14 May 1833 they founded the Gesellschaft zur Errichtung einer Eisenbahn mit Dampffahrt zwischen Nürnberg und Fürth ("company for the establishment of a steam railway between Nuremberg and Fürth") to develop the railway. Within six months the two main instigators from Nuremberg, the merchant and market chief, George Zacharias Platner, and the head of the poly-technical school, Johannes Scharrer, had successfully raised the planned share capital of 132,000 guilders. The proposed dividend of 122⁄3% was met with skepticism, although the company did, in fact, pay a dividend of 20% in 1836.

King Ludwig was an unenthusiastic supporter of railways because of his preference for building the Ludwig Canal between the Main and the Danube; this was actually built between 1836 and 1846. The canal was relatively unsuccessful because of its profusion of locks, its narrowness and early competition from railways, but it foreshadowed the more successful Rhine-Main-Danube Canal built on a similar route and completed in 1992. Ludwig allowed the railway company to use his name and authorized his government to buy a token two shares in it. Significantly for the construction of the railway, the king made available the Bavarian road builder, Paul Camille von Denis, for the railway construction. Von Denis adopted the English rail gauge of 1435 mm for the nearly dead-straight 6.04 km-long single-track line next to the Fürth-Nuremberg road.

Start of services

On 7 December 1835 the company opened the first German steam-powered railway line for passenger and freight traffic before a large public gathering. The steam locomotive Adler ("eagle") had been supplied with its driver by Stephenson’s company from Newcastle. The Remy & Co aus Rasselstein company of Neuwied, supplied only the 15-foot (4.6 m)-long rails of rolled wrought iron. The carriages were supplied by local wagon-builders.

On 20 September 1831 the private narrow gauge, horse-drawn Prince William Railway coal railway had opened between Hinsbeck (Ruhr) and Nierenhof, but it did not excite the public attention of a steam-hauled and passenger railway. Nevertheless, King Ludwig did not visit the railway named after him until August 1836. The cost of building the railway, which had been estimated at 132,000 guilders, actually reached 170,000 guilders as a result of lack of railway building experience and, in particular, the high price of land acquisition in the absence of a law providing for compulsory purchase.

Operations

Beginning on 8 December 1835 a horse-drawn service operated on the line from Nuremberg to Fürth once an hour. The Adler only operated at 13:00 and 14:00 daily. The high cost of importing hard coal from Saxony, which in the beginning still had to be brought by horse cart, prevented in the early years regular use of the Adler or the Pfeil ("arrow"). With the acquisition of more locomotives, only the early and late services were horse-drawn. Finally in 1863 horse operations were abandoned to reduce maintenance costs (especially the provision of horse tracks) and to raise speeds.

Goods traffic at first consisted of the carriage of newspapers and beer. General freight traffic only started in 1839 and mail traffic in 1840. The success of the line is shown by the fact that up to 1855 dividends were never less than 12%. At the time this was considered a magnificent capital return. Nevertheless, the government refused permission to extend the line to Würzburg.