The History of the Moor Railway

Bad Bramstedt’s first healing spring was discovered as early as 1681 at today’s Gesundbrunnen – it is regarded as the origin of the spa town. Over time it dried up and was not found again until 1761.

When the Gesundbrunnen became popular again after that, scientists examined the water. They considered it weak and advised diverting the moor water flowing past it – which the local bailiff then had done. At the time, then, the moor was still seen as a nuisance that diluted the healing power, not as a remedy. Curiously, patients credited the sand from the spring with more healing power than the water, for example for open sores on the legs.

But the decisive impetus came in 1879 from master carpenter Matthias Heesch: on his land, not far from the first spring, he struck a saline spring, built a bathhouse – the Matthias-Heesch-Bad, named after him – and offered cold – and later warm – brine baths, a novelty compared with the drinking cures that had been usual until then.

Since 1910 the town has been allowed to call itself “Bad” (spa). In 1911 Mr Behncke built “Behncke’s Sol- und Moorbad” right next to Heesch’s bathhouse – by then at the latest, Bramstedt was talking about moor baths. After the First World War the two establishments merged to form the “Kurhaus Sol- und Moorbad Bad Bramstedt” (brine and mud spa), with Oskar Alexander as leaseholder. Today Bad Bramstedt is a recognised moor spa (Moorheilbad).

The new leaseholder, Oskar Alexander, realised that the old bathhouses could no longer cope with the growing number of patients. He drew up plans for a modern sanatorium – and won over the social insurance funds and the town to his idea. The decision to build was taken on 13 December 1928: the partners were the regional insurance institutions (LVA) of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, the two regional associations of the local health insurance funds, and the town. A building committee bought meadows and moorland.

The “Rheumaheilstätte Bad Bramstedt GmbH” was founded on 2 April 1929, and construction began in May. The sanatorium was opened on 25 October 1930, and the first patients arrived on 1 February 1931. It was designed for 325 patients, and its 24 mud-bath cubicles needed around 20 cubic metres of fresh peat every day. So the moor was part of the concept from the very start – and to this day the Klinikum Bad Bramstedt is one of the few moor spas in Germany that has used it in therapy ever since it was founded.

By the way, sources disagree on the year the clinic was founded. A profile of the Klinikum gives 1928 – when Oskar Alexander recognised the importance of rheumatism treatment. Other sources give 1929, the year the company was established, and describe the sanatorium as one of the largest and most modern rheumatism clinics in Europe. The 1981 commemorative publication, in turn, counts from 1931, the year the first patients arrived: “300 Jahre Bad Bramstedter Heilquellen, 1681–1981; 50 Jahre Rheumaklinik Bad Bramstedt, 1931–1981” (edited by Horst Zimmermann).

In the First World War Oskar Alexander had fought as a front-line soldier on the Western Front. After an accident he volunteered to return to the front, was badly wounded in 1917 and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Hanseatic Cross. None of this protected him: Oskar Alexander, the sanatorium’s initiator and first director, was persecuted by the Nazis because of his Jewish origins and died in a concentration camp in 1942. The former “Ochsendrift” has borne his name since 1947 – and so does our Kurbahn.

Oskar Alexander had already created the most important precondition in 1928: he secured today’s moorland for the future sanatorium. In all of Bramstedt, he wrote in 1936, there was no other moor suitable for a moor spa in terms of both quantity and quality.

The expert report came from balneologist Dr Benade of the Reich Institute for Spa Testing. He said he had rarely seen such a plastic moor – the lower layers were like a ready-made paste.

Together with Bramstedt estate agent Julius Schnoor, Alexander bought almost 25 Morgen (about 6 hectares) holding enough peat for some 2.5 million baths – for 24,000 Reichsmarks. He advanced the money out of his own pocket and only got it back years later.

In the 1930 planning documents the site is called “Hamanns Sumpf” or simply “Moortümpel” (moor pond) – a hint that it is a silted-up pond, i.e. a fen. Its age is estimated at around 9,000 years. The name probably goes back to an earlier owner of the land – Hamann is a common surname in the area.

Incidentally, the clinic was very nearly built in Lüneburg: the town made great efforts to win over the insurance institutions and offered large building plots. According to Alexander’s own account, it was his initiative that tipped the balance in favour of Bramstedt.

That much peat could not be carted along unmade tracks by horse and wagon every day. So on 20 January 1930 the sanatorium applied to build a light railway about 2 kilometres long to the moor at “Hamanns Sumpf” – a silted-up pond, in other words a fen.

The line first ran alongside the AKN railway, then along today’s Birkenweg and finally along the old Ochsendrift. Local residents protested that the lane was too narrow: you couldn’t get past “a cartload of hay and the light railway at the same time”. An on-site inspection nonetheless found 50 centimetres of clearance – enough for “comfortable side-by-side travel”. The permit was issued on 15 May 1930.

A particularly clever touch was a swing bridge: where the moor railway crossed the AKN siding to the boiler house, the bridge was swung aside every evening and swung back into place each morning. By January 1931 the entire installation had cost 39,964 Reichsmarks.

At first the peat was extracted by hand from pits 2.5 to 3 metres deep, with pumps keeping the groundwater down. Horses pulled the tipper wagons to an open storage shed with up to seven tracks, where the peat was stored and dried. The shed still stands today.

In the 1960s a so-called “cemetery excavator” took over the extraction: a light excavator swung round by hand – like the muck loaders on farmyard dung slabs of the time. In 1976 it was followed by a heavy Fuchs excavator working on excavator mats. The tracks on the embankments between the pits were relaid again and again – exactly what a light railway is ideal for.

And even back then people thought in cycles: the used peat travelled back to the pits by rail, where it was left to regenerate for at least ten years.

The moor railway ran in a loop around the bathhouse and right through the four peat kitchens. There the peat was cleaned, ground, liquefied with moor brine and poured into oak tubs holding around 400 litres.

Heated with steam to 40–41 °C, the peat bath held its warmth for the full 20 minutes of the treatment. Every patient had “their own” numbered tub – more than 400 of them were in circulation, and as many as 500 at the opening. After the bath, a lifting and tipping device emptied the peat back into the wagons.

An electric railcar was originally planned. What kind of locomotives the sanatorium used between 1930 and the late 1950s, and who built them, has not, however, been established beyond doubt. The chronicle infers from a building application of April 1931 for a storage shed for oil and petrol that the sanatorium relied on combustion-engined locomotives from the outset. That does not hold up, though: the Jung locomotives as we know them did not even exist in 1930 – the oldest of the four dates from 1939.

Finds in the ground behind the former engine shed tell a different story: burnt-out grate bars and the whistle of a field railway locomotive point to at least two different steam locomotives. That fits the times: in years of shortages and of reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, new locomotives were hard to come by. The second steam locomotive was sold into civilian hands in the 1920s through the Reichswehr's authority for the demobilisation of military materiel. It came from French or British equipment captured in the First World War on the Western Front in France.

The two steam locomotives and the first motor locomotive worked side by side for some time. Once the motor locomotive was available, the steam engines were kept only as a reserve; after the 1948 currency reform their trail goes cold. Until the bog switched from horses to locomotives, the only wagons were tipper wagons holding 500 litres, some with hand-screw brakes. A special feature of the light railway on the bog site was – and still is – the hump: it lets the wagons be shunted by hand.

From the clinic's earliest days, four to five trains a day shuttled between the clinic and the moor, carrying around 1,800 cubic metres of fresh peat a year. The sanatorium bought its four Jung EL 110 light railway locomotives second-hand in the late 1960s – together with 15 tipper wagons of one cubic metre each – from the Benno Meyn company in Lübeck.

From 1974 the farewell came in stages: to make room for a new central heating plant on the clinic grounds, the peat shed – the winter store for the peat – disappeared there, together with the engine shed and the oil store for the motor locomotives. In 1976 work began on rebuilding the bath ring. At the end of June 1977 the day had come: decked out with garlands, the moor railway set off on its last run, watched by many clinic staff. A “golden” ribbon – actually more yellow – was cut, and a hearty farewell drink awaited everyone in the moor.

“Let us hope that losing the moor railway hasn’t also meant losing one of the last bits of cosiness in the workplace,” the technical manager said in farewell. A pipeline was laid along the old route at a depth of 1.50 metres, and from then on the peat was pumped through it. On the moor itself, however, the light railway kept on running.

On 3 October 1999 the Oskar-Alexander-Kurbahn began carrying visitors. Ever since, volunteers have kept the railway and the moor in good shape – mostly during Saturday work sessions. The Förderverein Deutsche Feldbahn e. V. supports its operation.

Since 2001 the lane to the moor has officially been called “An der Moorbahn”.

Yet the OAKB is more than the name of a moor railway – it brings several focal points together under one roof:

• Test railway: The line in Hamanns Sumpf is a narrow-gauge test track for components and assemblies of a future light railway to supplement public transport. The idea: rather than reactivating disused standard-gauge lines at 1,435 mm for millions, they are regauged to 600 mm using the existing material and operated with simpler, cheaper rolling stock. We are currently testing two new types of coupling on our vehicles in a long-term trial lasting several years.
• Moor information centre: Here we introduce our visitors to peat as a healing substance and show why moors are such important climate protectors.
• Out-of-school learning venue: On special trips, nursery children and school classes get to know the plants and animals of the moors in the Segeberg district – and above all those of Bad Bramstedt’s healing moor.

Together with the TALIT moor information centre, a place is taking shape here where industrial heritage, nature conservation and climate protection come together.