According to Deutsche Bahn, the line ends at Trebnitz on the former border between the Duchy of Anhalt and Prussia.

The operator was the Berlin-Anhalt Railway Company who purchased the line on 1 October 1871 for a million marks and extended it on 1 July 1874 to Magdeburg.

Until 1871 the section from Zerbst to Roßlau was called the Anhalt Leopold Railway (German: Anhaltische Leopoldsbahn).

In 1946, the electrification was restored throughout the central German rail network, but the infrastructure was abruptly dismantled and delivered together with the locomotives to the USSR as war reparations.

From 1994 there was also a pair of InterRegio trains with almost annual changes in route between Saxony and eastern Thuringia and north-west Germany.