The Taunus Railway (German: Taunus-Eisenbahn) is a double-track electrified railway line, which connects Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, Germany. It is 41.2 km long and follows the course of the Main on its north side, running quite close to it in some places. Its first stage was opened in September 1839 and is thus the oldest railway line in the German state of Hesse and one of the oldest in Germany. Today it is used by Regional-Express trains between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden and the trains of line S1 of the Rhine-Main S-Bahn between Frankfurt-Höchst and Wiesbaden. Between Frankfurt Hbf (Frankfurt central station) and Frankfurt-Höchst, they run on the line of the former Hessian Ludwig Railway.
History
The building of the line was preceded by many years of negotiations between the three sovereigns states through which the planned line ran: the Free City of Frankfurt, the Duchy of Nassau (of which Wiesbaden was capital) and the Grand Duchy of Hesse for the section in Mainz-Kastel, a suburb of Mainz on the eastern bank of the Rhine. In particular the Grand Duchy opposed its building, because it feared a loss of traffic to the port of Mainz as a result of the connection with the other two states and demanded instead rail connections between Frankfurt and its own cities of Darmstadt, Mainz and Offenbach. In the end they agreed on the current route.
A consortium to build the railway was established in 1835 under the leadership of the two Frankfurt banks Gebrüder Bethmann and Rothschild. The shares that it issued were immediately oversubscribed 40 times, enabling work to begin in 1837. Nevertheless, the final concession was not approved until 1838: by the City of Frankfurt on 8 May, by the Grand Duchy of Hessen on 11 May and by Nassau on 13 June. The private Taunus Railway Company (Taunus-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft) was established on 12 August 1838 in Frankfurt/Main. Paul Camille von Denis, a Bavarian, born in Mainz, who had worked on the first German railway, the Bavarian Ludwigsbahn between Nuremberg and Fürth (opened in 1835), designed the route.
Operations
The first stage was opened on 26 September 1839 from the Taunus station in Gallusanlage (now Willy-Brandt-Platz), Frankfurt, to the then small Nassau town of Höchst am Main by the Mainz masterbuilder, Ignaz Opfermann. The railway reached Hattersheim am Main on 24 November 1839 and Mainz-Kastel on 13 April 1840. The extension to the Wiesbaden Taunus station on the Rheinstraße was opened 19 May 1840. It was the ninth railway line opened in Germany.
The new railway line immediately led to changes in transport flows, while the losers from this development – especially in Mainz – vigorously defended themselves in an incident called the Nebeljungenstreich—"fog-boyish-prank"—when Mainz merchants sabotaged the port at Biebrich. Carting companies and drivers of the region, fearing for their income undertook an attack in Mainz-Kastel, on the line and damaged the tracks. They were prevented at gunpoint from inflicting more damage.
The director of the company from 1840 to 1852 was Johann Adam Beil, a Hessian privy councillor and former Frankfurt senator. The line was originally 43.4 kilometres long. A 6.6 kilometres branch from Höchst to Bad Soden (the Soden Railway) opened in 1863. Originally the railway operated six locomotives from the factory of George and Robert Stephenson, 87 carriages and 44 wagons. The first engine drivers were British.
Ownership change
The Taunus Railway suffered from competition from the Frankfurt–Mainz line (opened on the south bank of the Main in 1863) and it decided to sell its company to the Hessian Ludwig Railway (Hessischen Ludwigsbahn, HLB) in 1871. The HLB took over the enterprise with effect from 1 January 1872, but it sold it on to the Prussian state railways, which took it over on 3 May 1872.
In 1888, the line in Frankfurt was shortened by about a kilometre when it was diverted from its old railway terminal to the new Frankfurt Central Station (Hauptbahnhof). The same happened in 1906 at the Wiesbaden end, where the current Wiesbaden Central Station replaced the old Taunus station.
Operations after the First World War
In 1920, the line was taken over by the Deutsche Reichsbahn. It attained great importance for long distance, regional and suburban passenger traffic and to a lesser extent in freight traffic.