Rhenish Railway Company
The industrialists of the Rhineland and the Bergisches Land, then part of Prussia, sought to avoid paying the high tolls for using the Rhine imposed by the Netherlands and very early in its development, saw the possibility of the new means of transport, the railway.
Not having access to the Rhine, Belgium was at a commercial disadvantage to the Netherlands and therefore moved faster than any other country on the continent to build a rail network.
On 21 August 1837 the Company received a concession from the Prussian government to build the railway line from Cologne via Düren and Aachen to the Belgian border, a distance of 86 kilometres.
In addition, in 1864 the Pfaffendorf bridge was built over Rhine at Koblenz and connected with the Nassau State Railways in Oberlahnstein.
After the takeover of the BCE, Hermann Otto Pflaume completed plans for a new RhE Central Station in Cologne.
This line gave the RhE not only a connection to the Dutch North Sea ports but also part of a lucrative transit route from the Netherlands to Southern Germany and Switzerland.
In 1864 work began on the construction of the 170 km long Eifel line from Düren via Euskirchen and Gerolstein to Trier, which cost more than 16 million Prussian thalers.
This gave the RhE a line to the Saar coalfields and convenient connections to the iron ore mines of Lorraine now controlled by Germany as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
The continuation of the line from Troisdorf to Mülheim-Speldorf was completed on 18 November 1874, opening a cheap route for the shipping coal from the Ruhr to the south.
The Ruhr route ran largely parallel to the Bergisch-Märkische Railway Company’s existing Duisburg–Dortmund line and was quickly connected with many mines.
In 1873 the company continued its policy of aggressive competition in its decision to build a 75 km long railway line through the Bergisches Land from Düsseldorf to Dortmund Süd via Elberfeld, Schwelm Nord, Gevelsberg, Hagen, Herdecke and Hörde, which was completed on 19 September 1879.
The Cologne-Minden Railway Company had completed its line on 18 June 1874 from Wanne through Haltern, Münster, Osnabrück and Bremen to Hamburg.
On 1 July 1879 it opened the 175 km long Duisburg–Quakenbrück line via Oberhausen West, Bottrop Nord, Dorsten and Rheine to Quakenbrück.
The Rhenish Railway Company’s lines in the Ruhr were not well connected to economic centres due to the relatively late construction, especially since they had been planned primarily for the transport of coal.
The RhE was at that time the largest private company in Prussia with an initial share capital of three million Prussian thalers.
To meet the high capital requirements of the railway company, the bankers developed new forms of cooperation such as national consortia (underwriters) and later joint-stock banks.
On 23 February 1881 this was renamed the Royal directorate of left Rhine railways at Cologne (Königliche Eisenbahn-Direktion zu Köln linksrheinisch).
