page_title: Heinsberg–Lindern railway
section_title: Decline
hierarchical_section_title: Heinsberg–Lindern railway / History and operations / Decline
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Bombardier Talent BR 643.2 der Euregiobahn auf der Strecke Lindern-Heinsberg auf Sonderfahrt mit Politikern aus den Kreisen Düren, Aachen, Heinsberg und Regionalräten im Bahnhof Oberbruch
context_page_description: The Lindern–Heinsberg railway, also called the Heinsberger Bahn or Wurmtalbahn is a single-track branch line from Lindern on the Aachen–Mönchengladbach railway to Heinsberg in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was opened in 1890.
context_section_description: As early as 1966, rumours went around about a possible closure of the Heinsberg Railway. Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB) wanted to remove itself from loss-making operations on small secondary lines. Thus, the closure of the Heinsberg railway was discussed by DB.
  With the spread of motoring, passenger volume declined further in the 1970s. Public passenger traffic shifted away from the railway stations on the outskirts to buses operated by Deutsche Bundesbahn through the local centres and, at the same time, DB reduced services on the Heinsberg railway to only very few train pairs per day.
  In 1972, a ZDF broadcast called Länderspiegel compared the rather rural terminal station in Heinsberg with the main line Erkelenz station, in order to characterise the future district town of Heinsberg as a "peasant village" and to present the town of Erkelenz as a more suitable place for the administration of then newly formed Heinsberg district.
  Critics (local politicians and newspapers) saw the reduced supply as a cause of the drop in passenger numbers and claimed that the railway had systematically tried to make services on the route unattractive in order to use the resulting loss of passengers to build a case to close it. A further basis for this protest were the required passenger censuses of the local DB administration, which followed the usual DB practice in the 1970s and 1980s of being carried out during holidays, on days between weekends and public holidays (Brückentagen) or on weekends. A local CDU member of the Bundestag, Adolf Freiherr Spies von Büllesheim was doubtful about these surveys. He described the DB numbers as "unrealistic phantom numbers" which were "not verifiable".
  Despite this protest, the last scheduled passenger train ran on the line on 26 September 1980.
  While most of the stations on the line were demolished or used for other purposes, the Heinsberg station remained in operation (for the time being) as a service point for the freight traffic of the municipal gas works in Heinsberg. In the mid-1980s, however, the entrance building was demolished for the construction of the City Center.
  The shift of traffic from rail to road also took place in freight transport: with the transfer of small freight loads to the road through the new freight forwarding company, Bahntrans (a joint venture of DB and Thyssen Haniel Logistik), the transport of freight by rail was significantly reduced, making it unprofitable.
  However, the seasonally fluctuating rail transport of agricultural produce such as sugar beet or fertiliser also decreased because of the motorisation of the farmers and the agricultural trade increased significantly in the 1970s. With new, more powerful tractors, for example, sugar beet could be delivered directly to the sugar mill (for the Heinsberg farmers, for example, the sugar mills in Jülich or Ameln). Only a few customers, such as the municipal gas works, a timber yard and the Glanzstoff factory, remained in Oberbruch.
  The line was served several times a week in freight transport with locomotives of class V90 in 2010. The only freight transport customer to have remained was the Chemiepark ("chemical park") in Oberbruch. Freight transport at the Heinsberg and Dremmen stations was already planned to be closed on 28 May 1994 due to poor profitability. The Oberbruch – Heinsberg section was closed with effect from 24 December 1997.
  For the operation of the Chemiepark Oberbuch, the locomotive by the Chemiepark hauled freight wagons to Oberbruch station, where they were taken over by a DB locomotive operated by DB Schenker Rail (now DB Cargo).
  In the spring of 2007, the privately owned Rhein-Sieg-Eisenbahn (RSE) formed a joint venture to operate the Nuon plant of the Chemiepark Oberbuch, which required a train driver of the RSE and a shunter from Nuon to work together in shifts at the Oberbruch site. A diesel locomotive of the RSE was used, rather than a fireless locomotive. The reason for this was that the fireless locomotive of the "Meiningen" class, which had previously been used for shunting, had been taken out of s
caption: Special train in Heinsberg-Oberbruch in 2005
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