The train ride
A working track on site with steam locomotives.
EvaK โ CC BY-SA 2.5 ยท NearEMPTiness โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท NearEMPTiness โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท NearEMPTiness โ CC BY-SA 4.0
A very narrow-gauge railway โ often just sixty centimetres wide โ designed to be laid and dismantled quickly from prefabricated sections carried by hand. It was used where neither ordinary rail nor roads worked: inside mines, across muddy fields, and on shifting construction sites. In its time it was the most widespread and least visible infrastructure in industrial history.
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Frankfurt's Feldbahn museum is devoted to a forgotten kind of transport: the field railway โ temporary narrow-gauge track laid across fields, mines, factories and building sites to move material, then dismantled and carried to the next site. These networks were everywhere before lorries spread: in coal mines, brickworks and beet farms, and even in the trenches of the First World War, where they carried ammunition and the wounded. They vanished from the landscape entirely within a single generation, which is what makes documenting them meaningful. The museum is run by volunteers from an enthusiasts' association, holding over a hundred locomotives and vehicles restored by their own hands, and a working track around the site on which steam and diesel trains run. Operating days are limited โ usually certain Sundays in the warm season โ and riding is the core of the visit. Check the schedule, as the museum is shut on non-operating days.
A working track on site with steam locomotives.
The same type served in the First World War.
Am Romerhof 15a, 60486 Frankfurt