The company was dissolved in 1841 because it was understood that King Ludwig I intended to build a state railway and because the company had decided that the difficult geography between Donauwörth and Treuchtlingen (the Franconian Alb) made it impossible to build and operate a railway economically.

The Bavarian state government handled the problem of crossing the Franconian Alb by routing the Ludwig South-North Railway through the Nordlinger Ries depression.

Therefore, only the Augsburg–Donauwörth and Pleinfeld–Nuremberg sections of the Nuremberg–Augsburg line were part of the South-North Railway, which was authorised by the Bavarian parliament on 25 August 1843.

The gap between Donauwörth and Treuchtlingen was not completed until 1 October 1906, when more advanced steam engines made the operation of the hilly line more economic.

It passes through the districts of Sandreuth, Schweinau and Werderau and then crosses the South-west Tangent (Südwesttangente) freeway, the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal and the Ring line, where there is an extensive system of connecting lines and reaches the flying junction between the stations of Eibach and Reichelsdorf, which are now stations for the S-Bahn only.

In addition, the south main line track switches to the right, as trains have been running on the left since Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof, unusually for Germany.

The first Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan of 1973 identified a high-speed line between Würzburg and Augsburg via Nuremberg as one of eight development projects.

[4] Regional services on the line are administered by the Greater Nuremberg Transport Association (Verkehrsverbund Großraum Nürnberg, VGN).

The Allgäu-Franken-Express was eventually replaced by the Regional-Express lines RE 7 (to/from Lindau-Reutin) and RE 17 (to/from Oberstdorf), which are split/joined in Immenstadt, currently operating twice a day each way and stopping in Treuchtlingen and Nuremberg.