After the end of World War I, the German Imperial Railways compensated the Allies for a large number of locomotives and wagons. For more than ten years, Germany's railway development came to a standstill. By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany's railway network could no longer meet normal transport capacity needs. In the event that Hitler launches a war in the future, it will not be able to meet the needs of military transportation. So Nazi Germany quickly began modernizing its railway system to increase capacity.
In this context, Hitler, who always liked to build oversized buildings, proposed the idea of ??a "super railway". He believed that the "Stephenson gauge" that was commonly used in all countries around the world at that time, that is, the standard gauge of 1435 mm (4 feet 8 and 1/2 inches) proposed by Stephenson, a British railway engineer in the 19th century, had little impact on the technical needs and requirements of the 1940s. Technically obsolete. Hitler believed that the future Third Reich would be a continental empire. Just as the British Empire relied on the sea, the Third Reich would also rely on land transportation networks. So he decided to design a "super railway" system (Breitspurbahn, German for "broad gauge") across the European continent.
Under Hitler's order, Nazi Germany's Minister of Equipment and Arms Fritz Todt proposed a specific plan for the "Super Railway". Hitler requested that the track gauge of the super railway be 4 meters wide, but Todt believed that this width was far beyond the actual needs and reduced the track gauge to 3 meters. The roadbed of the "Super Railway" will use innovative ballastless-track technology, which uses concrete and asphalt mixtures to replace the roadbed paved with granular gravel. This concept was not proposed by the Germans until 30 years ago. It was later implemented for the first time by the San Francisco Light Rail System (BART), and was first used in high-speed rail construction by the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s.
The roadbed of the "Super Railway" will be prefabricated in the factory. It will look like two parallel "cement walls". It will be buried in the soil, and then cement cover slabs will be laid on the two "walls". , laying railroad tracks on it. In Russian regions, the roadbed will be 2 to 3 meters higher than the ground to avoid snow accumulation. The advantage of this technology is that it is easy to maintain, and the platform of the railway track can also be used as a military highway in an emergency.
Until the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, approximately 100 German officials and 80 engineers were responsible for the development of Hitler's "Super Railway". Rolling stock and related supporting railway technology are manufactured by Krupp, Henschel, Borsig, Krauss-Maffei, Brown, Boveri & Cie. ) and other well-known large companies, the power solutions include steam locomotives, diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, steam turbines and gas turbine locomotives, etc. The length of the locomotive ranges from 28.2 meters (12 axles, drive shaft type 3'Fo3') to 128 meters (52 axles, drive shaft type 2'Fo'Fo'2 '+5 +5 T5 T5 +2' Fo' Fo' 2'), the traction power ranges from 24,000 horsepower to 40,000 horsepower.
(The symbol 3'Fo3' is a classification method developed by the International Union of Railways for rail vehicles such as locomotives, trains, and trams. 3 represents three unpowered axles, and ' represents the axles placed on the bogie. On the top, F represents six continuously arranged driving shafts, and o represents that two or more consecutively arranged moving axles are independently driven. + indicates that the locomotive adopts a double-connected design)
Each carriage of the "Super Railway" is 42 meters long. meters, 6 meters wide, 7 meters high, and the railway limit (the maximum width of the car body cross-section) is 8 meters. Each train pulls 8 carriages. The length of the entire train is more than 500 meters and can carry 2,000 to 4,000 passengers.
According to the currently existing information, the passenger speed of the "Super Railway" is 200 kilometers per hour, and can reach a maximum speed of 250 kilometers per hour. Passenger car compartments are divided into the following classes:
●First-class and second-class day compartments: 48 first-class seats, 144 second-class seats, 12 bathrooms, as well as bars, salons, reading rooms and luggage rooms ;
●Third-class day car: 460 seats (8 seats per box), 12 bathrooms;
●First- and second-class dining cars: 130 people for dining dining table, as well as kitchen and pantry;
●Third-class dining car: The upper floor has 244 seats, and the lower floor is a 176-seat restaurant and kitchen;
●First-class and second-class Sleeper carriage: equipped with 16 first-class bedrooms (single) and 19 second-class bedrooms (double), as well as kitchen, breakfast restaurant, bathroom and 10 toilets;
●Third-class sleeper carriage: 44 Boxes (6 sleepers each), equipped with kitchen, shower room and 10 toilets;
●"Oriental Labor" (Slavic workers) carriage: 52 boxes, 480 seats, kitchen and toilets;
●Cinema Car: There is a 196-seat cinema, which can also be converted into a theatre;
●Salon Car: There is a bar, cafe and smoking room on the upper floor, and 4 on the lower floor. 2 bathrooms with bathtub, 20 shower rooms, and a barber/beauty salon that can accommodate 16 guests.
●Observation Car: Located at the end of the train, it has 16 first-class seats, 32 second-class seats and 160 third-class seats, as well as a dining table and viewing gallery.
●Mail car: loaded with mail, can accommodate 6 cars, and also has train conductor dormitories and kennels;
●Luggage car: in addition to luggage, it can also accommodate 2 cars , which also has catteries and kennels. In addition, in order to prevent guerrilla attacks, a 20mm anti-aircraft machine gun is also installed.
The "Super Railway" has a freight speed of 100 kilometers per hour. Each freight train can carry more than 10,000 tons of cargo, and can even transport warships weighing 1,500 tons from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
The super railway network envisioned by Hitler would be centered on the "World Capital Germania" (Welthauptstadt Germania, Hitler's new name for Berlin) and radially connect Hamburg, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Budapest, Istanbul, Kiev, Moscow and other major European cities, and in the future will also lead to Brest, Kazan, Baku and other places, and may even extend to Iran and India.
According to the idea, the "Super Railway" will have four main trunk lines:
East-West Railway: Paris-Saint-Quentin-Liège-Aachen-Bielefeld-Hannover- Germania (Berlin) South Station - Cottbus - Breslau - Katowice - Krakow - Lviv - Kiev - Poltava - Yusovka (now Donetsk) - Rostov. The eastern end will be extended from Rostov to Baku and will lead to Iran and India, and will be in line with the "Central Asia Trans-Railway" planned by the Japanese Railways Ministry in 1938 (Tokyo → Busan → Beijing → Baotou → Xi'an → Lanzhou → Hami → Kashgar → Kabul→Tehran).
Northern-Southeastern Railway: Hamburg-Wittenberg-Germania-Leipzig-Gotha-Bamberg-Nuremberg-Munich-Simbach-Linz-Vienna-Presburg ( Bratislava)-Budapest-Belgrade-Bucharest-Varna-Istanbul. The northern end will extend to Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Stockholm, and the southern end will extend to Syria and Egypt.
North-South Railway: Germania-Dresden-Osisch-Prague-Iglau (Ihlava)-Znaim-Vienna-Trieste-Venice- Bologna-Florence-Rome. It will be extended to Taranto and Messina in the future. Another north-south line runs from Mulhausen in Alsace to Madrid via Dijon, Lyon, Marseille, Barcelona and extends to Lisbon and Gibraltar.
East-West II Railway: Munich-Augsburg-Stuttgart-Karlsruhe-Strasbourg-Meuse-Reims-Paris, the eastern end will be extended to Moscow in the future.
The "Germania Railway Station" supporting the "Super Railway" project is an important part of the "Greater Germania Plan" designed by Hitler's favored architect Albert Speer. components. It is located at the southern end of the future Berlin's north-south axis "Victory Boulevard" and was transformed from the Berlin-Anhalt station built in the 19th century. The new station has a steel frame structure, the roof is covered with copper coverings, and the walls are lined with large tempered glass, which allows the interior of the station to be seen through and provides natural lighting.
The "Germania Train Station" is divided into four floors, connected by escalators and elevators. The bottom is the subway station, where many subway lines will meet; the second level is the ordinary railway lines; the third level, the ground level, is the "European Super Train" platform that Hitler would be proud of. The platforms of the suburban electric railway are gathered on the top floor.
According to Hitler and Speer’s vision, visitors to Berlin will see a large square one thousand meters long from north to south and three hundred and thirty meters wide from east to west after walking out of the north gate of the train station. ——"Victory Square". Three hundred cannons captured by the German army in World War II will be displayed around the square. At the northern end of the square is the large arch designed by Hitler, which is 170 meters long, 119 meters deep and 117 meters high (the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France is 50 meters high). Through the opening of the large arch, you will see the 290-meter-high bronze dome of the "Volkshalle" towering into the clouds in the distance.
The street between the Grand Arch and the "Great Hall of the People" is called "Victory Avenue". On both sides of this street are the eleven ministries of the Third Reich, all of which are magnificent monumental buildings. , is expected to be completed in 1950. According to Speer's recollection, before Hitler launched the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was still dreaming of holding a victory parade on this street in 1950. In the middle of "Victory Avenue" is a commercial area, followed by the huge "Military Hall" and the Army Headquarters. Hitler's Führer Palace is located to the west of the Great Hall of the Reich with its huge dome. To the north of the Great Hall is Nordbahnhof, another railway transportation hub in Berlin. As soon as you walk out of the station, you can see a square artificial lake dug out of the bend of the Spree River. Three buildings will be built on the west bank of the lake, including the Berlin City Council, the Berlin Police Headquarters and the Naval Headquarters, and on the east bank. It's the Military Academy.
But even during the Third Reich, there were endless criticisms of Hitler's "super railway" within Germany.
The main objection is that even if the track gauge is increased, the increased load capacity will not necessarily be greater. Although not obvious in the wilderness areas of the Soviet Union, the construction costs of such a railway would increase dramatically when passing through the densely urbanized and developed areas of Western and Central Europe. Like Hitler's "Great Germania" city plan and many other similar wild ideas, with the fall of the Nazi regime, this dreamy "Super Railway" plan ultimately failed to become a reality.