Die Gredlbahn
1. History
The establishment of the route was fixed in the §68 in the Bavarian local railway law passed at the 7.April 1884 of the Bavarian federal state parliament and the Reichskammer. The construction costs amounted at that time to 1.915 million Goldmark (48,600 Marks per kilometer). The official opening took place at the 1.Juni 1888 with three trains per day. The price for a roundtrip between Greding and Hilpoltstein costs two Marks - equated a daily wage -, the travel time on the 39 km long local railway ranged between 135 and 150 minutes. Numerous enterprises had their own track side tracks such that half of the assigned railroad cars were freight waggons.
At the 28th of May 1972 the passenger traffic was abandoned on the 12 kilometers long section Thalmässing - Greding and on the 29th of September 1974 on the 16 kilometers long section Thalmässing - Hilpoltstein. The last steam train drove the section to Thalmässing in 1998. Google.video.com hosts a video of this last trip with a BR 50. (start video...) Meanwhile the tracks between Hilpoltstein and Greding are dismantled. A 16.2 kilometers long cyclingpath now follows the old road bed. The stations in Hilpoltstein and Lohgarten Roth have been modernized. Today tramcars of the series 642 are serving (" Desiro") the traffic on the short remaining section. The traffic-execution-contract for the railroad runs until 2013.(de.Wikipedia, 08/06/08)
2. The BVE-Route
2.1 Development
The BVE Route targets an exact copy of the original scenery as much as possible. Since August 2007 numerous photographs of the environment have been taken. Due to the fact that the route covers only the season summer, are a lot of photos only partialy useful. The dimensions of the houses were determined and placed with Google Earth exactly. Also nearly every house was created with original pictures to gain a high recognition value. The consequence was a lot of work, which supplies therefore a relatively realistic impression of the town Roth.
2.2 Route length
Presently the route covers the 1,6 kilometer long section Roth-Station to Lohgarten-Roth. Perhaps the extension to Eckersmühlen becomes available soon, however closely settled areas, like behind Lohgarten, consume a lot of time.
2.3 Hardware-Requirements
The performance requirements are relatively high, because of a lot of highres textures. Antisotropic filtering and Antialiasing should always be enforced in the graphiccard menue to minimize the flickering of textures. On this reason should at least a Ati 1600XT with an C2duo E6400 or an Athlon +3700 perform in your computer. Furthermore are 2GB of Ram needed for the route.
3. Release
The route is currently under construction. The first section Roth - Lohgarten will probably be finished in the summer.
