Oberhausen-Osterfeld Süd–Hamm railway
railway line
The Oberhausen-Osterfeld Süd–Hamm railway, also called the Hamm-Osterfeld line (German: Hamm-Osterfelder Bahn), is a 76-kilometre long double-track electrified main line railway at the northern edge of the Ruhr in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
It has a continuous level route with no tunnels. Its eastern and central sections are now only used for freight, while its western section is also for passenger operations.
The main operator, Deutsche Bahn (formerly Deutsche Bundesbahn), has always referred to this line as the Nordstrecke ("northern line"). It was the northernmost route of the former railway division of Essen.
History
The line was built to relieve the existing network of railways in the Ruhr region, which was at the limit of its capacity, especially for freight traffic. The line was opened on 1 May 1905. It served primarily as a direct connection between the two major marshalling yards of Hamm and Osterfeld Süd to allow long-distance freight trains to avoid the Ruhr and to enable new coal mines to be connected to the railway network. The second track was added 1912.
The passenger services were always planned to be thin, despite there being several major cities along the route, as the line was mainly intended for freight traffic.
“Oberhausen-Osterfeld Süd–Hamm railway” enters the record as railway line. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Oberhausen-Osterfeld, Hamm and railway can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q802909. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1905 and 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oberhausen-Osterfeld Süd–Hamm 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.