Colonial Railway in H0e or 00-9

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Never built prototype colonial railway

Hi All,
one of my favourite colonial railway project is the old planned but never built german colonial railway at Bismarck Archipel. 

The Bismarck Archipel is located in the South Sea east of Indonesia at New Guinea, wich was until 1918 a part of the German Oceanic Colony.

At the today "New Britain" Island in their north-east of the Braining Mountains onto the Gazelle Halfisland is the Blanche Bay.


Copyright free Trackplan with friendly permission of the Colonial Archive of the University of Frankfurt at the river Main

The former german colonial gouvernor of the Bismarck Archipel wanted to have a railway for plundering natural resources.
The allready built 600 mm Field Narrow Gauge double track line was very inefficient and slow. The used Oxes did not allow higher speeds than really needed specially not to connect some villages and farms and plantations in the south.
The gouvernor ordered a railway engineer who came from the former german South-West Colony the today Namibia. In 1905 he started with te Evaluation of a possible railway line through the jungle.
For an efficient working railway the smaller 600 mm Narrow Gauge was too inefficient and for the wider Meter Gauge were the topographic area not ideal enough, so he decided to plan the railway in 750 mm Narrow Gauge like in his old homeland area of saxony. In 1907 the Gouvernor ordered several steam engines, goods wagons and passenger coaches and lot of railway building material of tracks and all what is needed to build the railway.
Meanwhile the plan of building the railway was in Berlin to get the OK from the Parlement. It took years over years when nothing happened. 
In 1910 a new colonial law had been created that did allow only two Narrow Gauges inside the German Reich and inside all their colonies.
All planned new to build railways need to have one of the allowed Gauges of 600 mm or 1000 mm. All other projects got not their OK.
Shortly there after the industries wanted to get payed for the ordered Railway Stuff but the Gouvernment cancelled the order and payed nothing. 
Railway projects of still existing nets of other Narrow Gauges were allowed to be build bigger but with directly connection of tracks to the expanding areas.
The Parlament would accept that in minimum 10 m of track would be enough with one Vehicle onto it that the permission will be given to expand the railway. 
This mistake was the death of that railway project.

For myself means it, that I may build a narrow gauge railway in H0e or 00-9 as freelanced projekt.

In the above plan is a special landing bridge to an at the end of the pier standing car shed. Two tracks do slinging together to across the landing bridge.
A short zick-zack shunting is needed to reach the lower coastal area.
The deep grade percentage is by around 3,2 % only.
That are a turntable and the typical triangle reversings were not planned let think to use short coupled twin locos or fairly type locos or even tender locos? Nobody knows it.
I think all kind of locomotives and wagons of that period of time until 1908 will be allowed as own exotic  freelanced narrow gauge project?


Take a ride on  G.W.&.A.R.R.

Best regards,
Yours Ingo
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