Heritage route
Brockenbahn
Wernigerode → Brocken · Germany
Brockenbahn in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 34 km
- Fastest time
- ≈ 1 h 45 min
- Average speed
- 19 km/h
- Top speed
- 40 km/h
- Operator
- Harzer Schmalspurbahnen
- Train
- Class 99 2-10-2T steam
- Countries
- Germany
- In service since
- 1899
- Runs
- several steam trains daily, year-round
- Highest point
- 1,125 m
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Metre-gauge steam still storms year-round to the 1,141 m Brocken. Goethe’s witches’ mountain, sealed off as a Soviet listening post until 1989.
The 700-horsepower tank engines, built new for these lines in the 1950s, take water at Drei Annen Hohne before attacking the mountain in a near-continuous climbing curve through Harz National Park spruce. Higher up, the Brocken makes its own weather, fog on some 300 days a year, which only sharpens the moment the panorama across northern Germany snaps open. On Walpurgis Night, 30 April, the carriages fill with costumed witches bound for the summit revels.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 54455 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 4 m from it
- Checked against the running timetable via ÖBB Scotty: our line sits 0.3 km from the shape of HSB (Zug-Nr. 8931)
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Wernigerode’s half-timbered old town
- Drei Annen Hohne junction
- Schierke village
- Harz National Park spruce forest
- Brocken summit — station at 1,125 m
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