page_title: History of rail transport in Germany
section_title: Forerunners
hierarchical_section_title: History of rail transport in Germany / Forerunners
caption_attribution_description: English: Early mine wagon (German: "Leitnagel-Hund") running on wooden rails.
context_page_description: The history of rail transport in Germany can be traced back to the 16th century. The earliest form of railways, wagonways, were developed in Germany in the 16th century. Modern German rail history officially began with the opening of the steam-powered Bavarian Ludwig Railway between Nuremberg and Fürth on 7 December 1835. This had been preceded by the opening of the horse-drawn Prince William Railway on 20 September 1831. The first long-distance railway was the Leipzig-Dresden railway, completed on 7 April 1839.
context_section_description: The forerunner of the railway in Germany, as in England, was to be found mainly in association with the mining industry. Mine carts were used below ground for transportation, initially using wooden rails, and were steered either by a guide pin between the rails or by flanges on the wheels.
  A wagonway operation was illustrated in Germany in 1556 by Georgius Agricola (image right) in his work De re metallica. This line used "Hund" carts with unflanged wheels running on wooden planks and a vertical pin on the truck fitting into the gap between the planks to keep it going the right way. The miners called the wagons Hunde ("dogs") from the noise they made on the tracks. Such wagonways soon became very popular in Europe.
  From 1787, a network of wagonways, about 30 kilometres long, was also built above ground for the coal mines of the Ruhr in order to streamline the daily transportation of coal to loading quays on the River Ruhr. As elsewhere the railway network in the Ruhr was horse-drawn, and was not available to the public as transport. Some of these tracks were already using iron rails – hence the German term for railway, Eisenbahn, which means "iron way". The Rauendahl Incline (de) in Bochum (1787) and the Schlebusch-Harkort Coal Railway (de) (1829) are examples of railways from those early days that can still be seen today. From 1827–1836, a wagonway was also built in Austria and Bohemia from Budweis to Gmunden via Linz (de).
  The railways in Germany were given a significant impetus by the development of the first working locomotives in England (by Richard Trevithick in 1804 and John Blenkinsop in 1812) and the opening of the first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, in 1825. In Germany, even before the first real railways opened, there were attempts to use locomotives for railway operations. For example, in 1815, Johann Friedrich Krigar (de) built a copy of the Blenkinsop steam engine at the Royal Iron Foundry (de), Berlin, for Königshütte in Upper Silesia; and, in 1818, he built another locomotive for the 1.8-kilometre-long Friederiken-Schienenweg (de), a coal line near Geislautern in the Saarland, which had been converted in 1821 from wooden to iron rails. This engine worked, but failed to meet expectations due to its poor performance.
caption: A German mine cart with a guide pin (in Fig. F), in a 1556 drawing by Georgius Agricola (De re metallica Libri XII), the forerunner of all modern railway wagons
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