Prince William Railway Company

It built a 820 mm (2 ft 8+9⁄32 in) narrow gauge line that ran for a Prussian mile (7,532 metres or 8,237 yards) along the Deilbach valley from a point near Kupferdreh Old Station in Hinsbeck, a suburb of Kupferdreh (now part of Essen), to Nierenhof near Langenberg (now part of Velbert).

Friedrich Harkort had an early interest in improving the transportation of coal from the Ruhr in the Bergisches Land to Wuppertal.

In 1826 he had built a small test track, as a monorail following a design of the Englishman Henry Robinson Palmer.

While Egen and Harkort fought out their differences, and even before an application for a concession was made, opposition began to surface from carters and horse drivers engaged in coal transportation.

He founded the Deil Valley Railway Company, the first German railway joint stock company in 1828 with his brother, the industrialist Ludwig Mohl, Peter Nikolaus Caspar Egen, Dr. Voss (a physician and miner from Steele, now part of Essen) and Reichmann and Meyberg (merchants from Langenberg).

It was built on oak sleepers, on which two 3.30 m (10 ft 9+7⁄8 in) long planks called Straßbäume, ("street trees") were secured with wooden nails.

The Straßbäume were covered with a running surface of 40 mm (1+9⁄16 in) thick iron, known, using British terminology as a plateway.

The line ran for a Prussian mile (7,532 metres or 8,237 yards), and its gauge was 820 mm (2 ft 8+9⁄32 in) narrow-gauge.

The transitional sections were at the beginning and end of the line, at "Kupperdrehe" and Eisenhammer in Deilmannhof im Deilbachtal.

On 29 June 1844 the Treasury gave permission for the company to build an extension in the north to Steele and in the south to Vohwinkel.

It offered purchasers of shares the guarantee of favourable freight rates, but the mining companies rejected this.