Breitspurbahn

Proposed route map 1943.

Models of double-deck wagons at the DB Museum, Nuremberg.

The Breitspurbahn (German pronunciation: [ˈbʁaɪtʃpuːɐ̯baːn], translation: broad-gauge railway) was a planned 3000 broad-gauge railway, a personal pet project of Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich of Germany, supposed to run on 3 metre gauge track with double-deck coaches between major cities of Grossdeutschland, Hitler's expanded Germany.

History

Since reparations due after WWI had to be paid, Deutsche Reichsbahn, Germany's railway company lacked money for appropriate expansion and sufficient maintenance of their track network and rolling stock.

After the Machtergreifung (seizure of power) of Hitler and the NSDAP, plans for war were laid out and secret preparations started. As commercial and civilian traffic had increased due to economic stimulation by the NSDAP, Deutsche Reichsbahn was now faced with a serious capacity problem. As a result, in part driven by their military objectives, Hitler and the NSDAP began to prepare plans to modernize the railway network and increase transport capacity

Hitler enthusiastically embraced a suggestion from Fritz Todt to build a new high-capacity Reichsspurbahn (Imperial Gauge Railway) with notably increased gauge, and made this one of his pet projects. Objections from railway experts - who foresaw difficulties in introducing an incompatible gauge (and proposed 4-track standard gauge lines instead) and who could not imagine any use for the vast transport capacity of such a railway - were ignored and Hitler ordered the Breitspurbahn to be built with initial lines between Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich and Linz.

The project engaged commercial partners Krauss-Maffei, Henschel, Borsig, BBC, Krupp, but did not develop beyond line planning and initial survey.

Tracks

Originally proposed as a 4 metre track, the Breitspurbahn was developed with a track width of Template:RailGauge/metric, over double the width of the common standard gauge track, and three times the width of the common semi-narrow "metre gauge" track. Planning called for a ballastless track (much as was developed 30 years later for San Francisco BART and 40 years later for German high speed lines) which consisted of two parallel steel-concrete walls embedded in the ground with the rails fixed on top, with an elastic material between rail and concrete. Without sleepers this would also have formed an ideal road for maintenance and military purposes.

Vehicles

The proposal was that high-performance-locomotives should pull 8-axle double-floor carriages with a length of 42 metres (138 ft), width of 6 metres (19 ft 8 in) and height of 7 metres (23 ft 0 in). The trains would be fitted with a restaurant, cinema, swimming pool, barbershop and sauna. The whole train would have a length of about 500 metres (1,600 ft), allowing a capacity of between 2,000 and 4,000 passengers, travelling at speeds of 200 kilometres per hour (120 mph). Various designs of locomotive were proposed, from steam to diesel, all requiring power of between 24 000 - 40 000 PS (18 - 29 MW).

Proposed routes

• East-West: Rostov - Stalino - Poltava - Kiev - Lviv - Kraków - Katowice - Wrocław - Cottbus - Welthauptstadt Germania (Berlin) - Hanover - Bielefeld - Ruhrgebiet - Aachen - Liège - St. Quentin - Paris
• North-Southeast: Hamburg - Wittenberge - Welthauptstadt Germania (Berlin) - Leipzig - Gotha - Bamberg - Nuremberg - Munich - Simbach am Inn - Linz - Vienna - Bratislava - Budapest - Belgrade - Bucharest - Varna/Burgas - Istanbul
• North-South-Parallel: Welthauptstadt Germania (Berlin) - Dresden - Ústí nad Labem - Prague - Jihlava - Znojmo - Vienna - Trieste - Rome
• East-West 2: Munich - Augsburg - Stuttgart - Karlsruhe - Metz - Reims - Paris - Marseille - Spain

For further routes, see German version and Dutch version.

References

• Die Breitspurbahn, Anton Joachimsthaler. Herbig, 1996. ISBN 3-7766-1352-1
• Broader than Broad: Hitler's Great Dream: Three Meter Gauge Rails Across Europe, Barnes, Robin. Locomotives International. 1998. ISBN 1-900340-07-0

External links

• breitspurbahn.de Pictures of the "Breitspurbahn"