Höllentalbahn (Black Forest)
railway line
The Höllentalbahn (literally, "Hell Valley Railway") is a railway line that partially runs through the Höllental valley in the Black Forest of Germany. The line connects Freiburg im Breisgau with Donaueschingen, a distance of 74.7 km (46.4 mi).
Over its entire course the line rises from an altitude of 278 m (912 ft) in Freiburg to 885 m (2,904 ft) in Hinterzarten. Part of the route has a 5.5% gradient, making the line one of the steepest in Germany.
The section Freiburg-Neustadt is electrified since 18 June 1936. Because of this and the steady decrease of traffic between Neustadt and Donaueschingen the route did not represent an operational unit anymore. The last direct connection between Freiburg and Donaueschingen ended in 2003 with the Kleber-Express Freiburg-Munich being discontinued. The missing section was electrified until the end of 2019 in the course of the project “Breisgau-S-Bahn 2020”, in order to enable direct trains from Breisach via Freiburg, Neustadt and Donaueschingen to Villingen.
History
The line, which opened as far as Neustadt in 1887, was constructed for the Grand Duchy of Baden State Railway and was the last project of railway architect Robert Gerwig. The 7.2 km (4.5 mi) section of the line between Hirschsprung and Hinterzarten has a maximum gradient of 5.5%, and was initially operated as a rack railway on the Riggenbach system.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Höllentalbahn (Black Forest)” as railway line. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q314772. The first chronological checks are 1936, 2003, 2019 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Höllentalbahn (Black Forest)” 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.