Wieslauterbahn
In 1966, in response to competing private transport, passenger services were discontinued, with the exception of the "Bundenthaler" excursion train starting in Ludwigshafen.
In 1997, passenger services were reintroduced on Sundays and public holidays, the continuation of which was temporarily at risk after the turn of the millennium, but has since been secured for the medium term.
The first plans for the construction of a railroad line through the Wasgau region and its Dahner Felsenland section existed as early as 1862.
[1] The line was to run from Zweibrücken via Pirmasens, Kaltenbach [de], Dahn and Bergzabern and join the Palatinate Maximilian Railway, which opened in 1855, at Winden.
[2] Together with the full length of the Winden-Karlsruhe railroad line, which opened in 1865, it was intended to act as part of a further route for transporting coal from the Saar region.
As a direct result, the Alsatian town of Weißenburg (formerly Wissembourg) made efforts to build a route along the Wieslauter via Dahn and Selz to Rastatt to serve international traffic.
At the same time, the management of the Palatinate Railways presented plans for a railroad line from Hinterweidenthal to Bergzabern, which was to run mainly along the Wieslauter.
[11] The new branch station Kaltenbach Ost was built on the Südpfalzbahn between the Hauenstein and Hinterweidenthal-Kaltenbach stops especially for the new railroad line.
The line was initially operated by the Royal Bavarian State Railways, which had owned the entire Palatinate rail network for almost three years.
[15] Just a few years after the opening of the line, an excursion train from Landau to Bundenthal-Rumbach ran every Sunday on the initiative of the Palatinate Forest Association.
The government in Bavaria had already declared its willingness to build the extension to Weißenburg on Palatinate territory in 1910, provided that in return the Imperial Railways in Alsace-Lorraine went along with the planned construction of a Kaiserslautern-Pirmasens-Trulben-Eppenbrunn-Bitsch main line.
As Weißenburg (French: Wissembourg), together with the rest of Alsace, became part of France again after the end of the war, the corresponding plans finally came to a standstill.
[9] In the period that followed, initiatives were formed to continue the line southwards along the Sûre, in particular to connect the villages of Schönau, Fischbach and Ludwigswinkel, which had previously remained isolated, to the rail network.
[13] After the First World War, the military occupation of the areas on the left bank of the Rhine by Allied troops began in 1919.
[16] At the instigation of the French military, which operated a camp in Ludwigswinkel as part of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland, the short-lived Wasgauwaldbahn, which began in Bundenthal, was built from 1920.
The original plan was to build it in standard gauge as a continuation of the Wieslauterbahn via Niederschlettenbach-Nothweiler-Schönau-Fischbach; the Reichsschatzministerium only allowed a narrow-gauge version for cost reasons.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the Reich government designated a 20-kilometre-wide strip near the border with France as the Red Zone, which included the Wieslauterbahn.
[17] After the Second World War, the railroad line was under the control of the Betriebsvereinigung der Südwestdeutschen Eisenbahnen (SWDE), which was transferred to the newly founded Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB) in 1949.
[21] The population protested so vehemently against this plan that they delayed the departure of the last scheduled train at Dahn station on September 24, 1966 by several hours.
This led to the founding of the Eisenbahnfreunde Dahn e. V. association in 1987, whose aims included saving the Wieslauterbahn from closure and placing it under a preservation order.
As the line was located within the Red Zone, there was initially no passenger traffic after the outbreak of the Second World War; between 1940 and 1944 there were five pairs of trains a day.
In the mid-1950s, the line had the busiest passenger service in its history: A total of eight pairs ran between Hinterweidenthal and Bundenthal-Rumbach on weekdays, and another one on Sundays.
[34] In the first years after the reactivation of passenger transport on Sundays and public holidays in 1997, two pairs of trains ran, the number of which later increased to four.
A decade earlier, a siding to a neighboring NATO fuel depot was built between Hinterweidenthal Ort and Dahn stations at line kilometer 3.78.
[36] As a result, heavy tank wagon trains, for which a separate diesel locomotive was responsible, ran regularly on the northern section of the line.
After the end of the Cold War, the United States Army gave up the tank farm and a military site near Fischbach in 1992.
[55] The staff were withdrawn in 1967,[56] but the station still had a siding in the 1980s.There are future plans to build a new platform in a different position and abandon the existing one.
In the same year, the association acquired a Dillinger Hütte works locomotive built by Škoda in 1941, which stands as a monument on the station forecourt.
[58] Although the introduction of regular train connections has been discussed time and again, especially in rush-hour traffic, it was not included in the tender for the Palatinate network for commissioning on December 10, 2023.
[59] In freight transport, there are repeated considerations to activate the siding at the former Busenberg-Schindhard station for the shipment of round timber, for which, however, a suitable loading area would have to be created.
