Reactivated branch lines: the German railways has - again

Since 41 years, Nordhorn no railway connection, is happening now unheard: Deutsche Bahn will more than 53,000 - w hich in Lower Saxony starting again soon. A Ortsbesuch.

If Johann Thien the lever shifts and his locomotive on the route to Nordhorn controls, driving it in a past epoch. He moves into a world, nor in the train driver before crossing with the hand and press on the horn. Then wait for farmers in these level crossings in their tractors patiently Thien relate to you vorbeizuckelt freight train with 40 kilometers per hour. (If you want to now the route from the Lokfuhrer-Perspektive experience? At the end of the text you will find a video.)

Lapidation on thousands of kilometers over the last decades of the movement, only freight trains still travel has been set here and there. Now the Land of Lower Saxony would like to reactivate three routes for passenger trains. The red-green coalition in Hanover sees this as a contribution to an environmentally friendly transport policy: by rail instead of road. The county of Bentheim is one of the places where the years of struggle for the railways was successful.

41 Years ago, the last scheduled passenger train in the county seat. Thousands took on the platform, the "locals go messages," wrote at that time: "In Bentheim and Quendorf fins the first tears, because it was said: 'left behind! The cars are busy. '" it was just extra eight coupled wagons.

Train driver Thien, 55, of the present, with its freight train driving the route to Nordhorn, remembers the time of passenger trains: "Yes, I am here in the third generation. Grandpa, dad and I, we were all for the Bentheimer railway." His father worked as a stoker on the last steam locomotive on the track either stomped.

The Bentheimer railway belongs in the majority of the rural district of Grafschaft Bentheim; also had to compensate for the bulk of the deficit, the passenger trains year for year imports. Therefore the politicians decided at the beginning of the seventies, to relocate the traffic on buses. So that the train was driven in Nordhorn. "At that time, it was not thought far enough," says Berling.