Classic route
Braunschweig–Uelzen railway
Braunschweig → Uelzen · Germany
Braunschweig–Uelzen railway in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 97 km
- Fastest time
- ≈ 1 h 46 min
- Average speed
- 55 km/h
- Top speed
- 120 km/h
- Operator
- erixx
- Train
- erixx RB47
- Countries
- Germany
- In service since
- 1873
- Runs
- hourly
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
The emigrants’ road: Braunschweig via Gifhorn to Uelzen, on to the America ships at Bremen and Hamburg; single track since the war, never wired, famously Germany’s most delayed line.
Before the war this was an emigrants’ road: south Germany to Braunschweig, up through Gifhorn to Uelzen, and on to the ships at Bremen and Hamburg. It came out of the war cut to a single unelectrified track, and only new passing loops in recent years brought back an hourly train, which now uses every path the line has. Signs on the platform at Gifhorn keep the station’s dark century in view: two wartime accidents that each killed more than a hundred people, and a transport of displaced persons, forgotten in the station after the war, who died after mistaking aviation fuel for drink and were moved from a mass grave to a cemetery only decades later. erixx’s RB47 railcars make the 97 km in about 1 h 46, and a new station at Isenbüttel is due to open this year.
How this line was checked
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 5 m from it
- Checked against the running timetable via ÖBB Scotty: our line sits under 100 m from the shape of RB47 (Zug-Nr. 83604)
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Gifhorn, once a junction with turntable and roundhouse
- The memorial signs by platform 5 at Gifhorn
- Heath and moor toward Wittingen
- Uelzen’s Hundertwasser station
Read more on Wikipedia (in DE) ↗
More classic routes
- LNER Azuma
The Flying Scotsman’s route since 1862: and where Mallard set the never-beaten steam record of 203 km/h in 1938.
Wikipedia ↗ - Alfa Pendular
A tilting Pendolino leaning through the curves of the 19th-century Linha do Norte between Portugal’s two great cities.
Wikipedia ↗ - EIP Pendolino
Rides Poland’s 1970s Central Main Line (CMK), engineered decades ahead of its time and now being upgraded to 250 km/h.
Wikipedia ↗ - Railjet
Follows the old Orient Express alignment down the Danube plain: centre to centre faster than any flight.
Wikipedia ↗
More train routes in Germany.