Cologne-Minden trunk line

The Cologne-Minden trunk line is a railway built by the Cologne-Minden Railway Company (Cöln-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, CME). The line is the westernmost part of the railway line from Berlin to the Rhine that was proposed by Friedrich List in his Concept for a railway network in Germany, published in 1833. In fact, Friedrich Harkort (“father of the Ruhr”) had proposed the construction of a railway line from Cologne to Minden in 1825.

History

On 18 December 1843, the CME was awarded the concession to build a railway line between the metropolis of Cologne, the cities of the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area and Minden to connect with the network of the Royal Hanoverian State Railways.

A route through the Bergisches Land had been dropped was due to the high cost of the engineering structures that would have been required on the advice of the Aachen merchant and banker David Hansemann (1790-1864), who was then briefly Prussian Minister of Finance. Instead, the chosen route that bypassed the Bergisches Landran was selected. It ran from Deutz (now a suburb of Cologne) further north through Mülheim am Rhein, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Oberhausen, Altenessen, Gelsenkirchen, Wanne, Herne and Castrop-Rauxel to Dortmund and on to Hamm, Oelde, Rheda, Bielefeld and Herford to Minden.

The first leg from Deutz to Düsseldorf opened on 20 December 1845. Only a few weeks later, on 9 February 1846, the second section was completed to a temporary terminus at the site of present-day Duisburg Hauptbahnhof called the Duisburg Cologne-Minden station, the first of three stations built on the same site. The next section from Duisburg to Hamm was opened on 15 May 1847.