The übeckBüLübeck-Büchen Railway (, LBE) was a German railway company that built railway lines from Lübeck to Büchen and to Hamburg in the 19th century.
History
Background
The first plans to build a direct rail link between Hamburg and Lübeck were put forward in 1831 by the Lübeck merchant Emil Müller and his father Nicholas Hermann Müller. After the French occupation of Lübeck, Nicholas Hermann Muller had been committed to improving its transport links. He established the first steamship company in Lübeck, operating regular service between Lübeck and Copenhagen.
Emil Müller proposed in 1831 the construction of a railway line between Hamburg and Lübeck, connecting the North and the Baltic Seas, but finding little support in Lübeck, he travelled to London in 1833, where he eventually found investors. Müller recruited as senior engineer Francis Giles, the Chief Engineer of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway (1829–1836). Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the designer of London's Thames Tunnel (1825–1843) also offered their services to Müller. In September 1833, Giles' assistant William Lindley travelled to Hamburg. He would later lead the successful construction of the Berlin-Hamburg Railway and the Hamburg urban drainage scheme. He began surveying the line on 6 November 1833. Although the line would have to run through Holstein-Glückstadt, which was ruled by the King of Denmark, Lindley decided not to submit an application to the Danish authorities for approval for this survey work prior to carrying it out in order to save time.
1834 Giles went to Copenhagen, where on 10 August he submitted the projected railway for approval. Only on this occasion, did he inform the King of Denmark of the survey work that had taken place; this upset the court and affected the simultaneous negotiations on the construction of the Hamburg–Lübeck highway. The railway company was established and investors were sought (with the intention of issuing 15,000 shares at £ 20 sterling each), but share subscription was slow and in 1839 Müller abandoned the project, dissolving the first Lübeck railway company.
A new start was made in 1843, when Lübeck Council decided that it would lead a project to build a railway to Hamburg and took the issue up with the Danish government. The Holstein area lying between Hamburg and Lübeck, however, was under the rule of the Danish king and the Danish court refused to allow the building of a direct connection between the two cities. This was probably at the urging of Holstein and especially of the Kiel district, which considered that the trading activities of Hamburg and Lübeck and their tax and customs laws discriminated against Kiel.
Following pressure from the other states of the German Confederation, as well as Russia and France, the Danish government committed itself on 23 June 1847 to the construction of a railway from Lübeck to Büchen in the Duchy of Lauenburg to connect with the Berlin–Hamburg Railway. Among the supporters for Lübeck's proposal were such renowned figures as Alexander von Humboldt, Klemens von Metternich and the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV.
Consent was given three days before the beginning of the German-nationalist public song festival in Lübeck, and three months before the start of the Germanists’ day (Germanistentag) in Lübeck (27–30 September 1847), chaired by Jacob Grimm, following the first Germanists’ day meeting in the previous year in Frankfurt am Main. The Germanists’ days were part of a political movement in opposition to Denmark's control of Schleswig-Holstein, which gave rise to the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Among other reasons for the selection of the venue for the Germanists’ day had been that the blocking of rail services to Lübeck by Denmark was seen as a "national question", despite the remote location of Lübeck in Germany and the poor accessibility of the missing rail link.
The line was to be an indirect, 35 km-long connection from Lübeck to Hamburg. This compromise meant that the competing Altona-Kiel Railway Company (Altona-Kieler Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft) had an advantage in that the connection from Lübeck to Hamburg via Büchen now had about the same track length as the rail link between Altona and Kiel (both then in Holstein).
Construction of the network
After the Lübeck-Büchen Railway Company was established on 27 February 1850, work began on the construction of the line from Lübeck via Ratzeburg and Mölln to Büchen. A labour force of 2,500 mostly unskilled workers were engaged on the line's earthworks for a total of 400,000 working days up to April 1851.