As a result, aspirations arose for a connexion between the Bamberg-Würzburg railway at Schweinfurt and the Werrabahn at Meiningen, not least in order to improve the accessibility of the Saxon-Meiningen provincial capital.

So the governments of Bavaria and Saxe-Meiningen signed a state treaty on 21 March 1868 for the establishment of a railway line from Schweinfurt via Neustadt an der Saale to Meiningen.

The Bavarian state railway took on the construction and management of the entire route; each government bore the cost of the section of the line on its own territory.

This required locomotives to be exchanged as the train crossed over from the jurisdiction of the Prussian to the Bavarian state railways at either Meiningen or Ritschenhausen.

The Erfurter Bahn also operates the EB 5 Regionalbahn route (the Franconian Saale Valley railway or Fränkische Saaletalbahn) using the Unterfranken-Shuttle on the Schweinfurth–Eberhausen line and running it through to Bad Kissingen and Gemünden am Main.