Hochstadt-Marktzeuln–Probstzella railway
railway line in Germany
The Hochstadt-Marktzeuln–Probstzella railway (also called in German the Frankenwaldbahn, "Franconian Forest Railway"), route no. KBS 840, is an 88 kilometre long, electrified, double-tracked main line from Lichtenfels via Kronach to Saalfeld. It is part of the Munich–Nuremberg–Bamberg–Jena–Halle/Leipzig–Berlin trunk route. It was completed in October 1885.
The Franconian Forest line branches off from the Ludwig South-North Railway at Marktzeuln. Climbing from Pressig-Rothenkirchen and Probstzella to Steinbach am Wald the line ascends the heights of the Franconian Forest (Frankenwald). The line has a maximum incline of 29 ‰ and, even today, heavy goods trains require an additional banking locomotive at the front or rear of the train.
Route
The Franconian Forest Railway leaves the Ludwig South-North Railway, which runs through the Main Valley from Bamberg to Kulmbach, at Marktzeuln and heads into the Rodach Valley to Kronach. From there it switches to the valley of the Haßlach and follows it, getting ever narrower and steeper, to Pressig and onto the watershed between the Rhine and Elbe basins in Steinbach am Wald. Here the line reaches its highest point at 594.54 m above NN and crosses the Rennsteig in a cutting.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q877800. Authority coordinates are 50.153, 11.172. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hochstadt-Marktzeuln–Probstzella railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.