The author could write a book... and still has to get by with a 5000 character limit! Well - let's try it! It was 1997 when the idea of ​​organizing a special trip on the Querfurt military railway first came up. No one had ever managed to do it before... And with every day that I thought about it, the idea stuck a little more firmly in my head... If you had known... you would have run away, tearing your hair out! A lot had happened in the meantime, and the author now had more time to devote to such things. Still 'believing in the good', 'MQ Special' took shape on the drawing board, and the climax was of course to be the Querfurt military railway. But you should have been warned - declaring something a 'climax' usually means it falls through! We had heard about it several times before! And so it happened. The tasks that had to be completed in order to travel to 'Texas' (the popular name for the military area west of Querfurt) were so immense that it was easy to forget about it for the 'MQ Special' date. Well - the special trip was still a success - even without 'Texas'. We were there anyway - half a year later. But that's a separate story for a separate video. These trips were such a lasting experience that they called for a sequel. And it was the time when the author's legendary 'team' was formed - welded together from blisters, pulled muscles, bodies scratched by blackberries through the laundry, feeling every single bone and leaving behind hotel rooms that 'smelled' of the forest, which had to be aired out for at least a week after us. You can only experience something like that, it cannot be described in words! The sequel was difficult, everyone had their daily routine and life went on. But '10 Years of Texas' was to take place in 2009, that was clear. Of course not at the original location, that was long gone. No, we wanted to revive the now closed Schraplau - Querfurt section for a day - with the clear option of reusing it as a heritage railway! Again a lot of 'sporting activity', now with 'professional equipment' - DB Netz couldn't have achieved a better profile than we did! But we failed because of the bureaucracy, not even because of the unwillingness! No, there was a lot of understanding and sympathy - but the 'DB AG system' had become so 'invincible' that those responsible could no longer get out of it. Sympathy or no sympathy... The dream was shattered, for good! It was clear that things would never get better and that conditions would never change in our favor. Since this was not only the case in Querfurt, the tasks of the 'team' also became more manageable... And this is the right place for a big thank you to you, guys! We had a fantastic time and achieved some irretrievable things and made a mark! We only managed that together - thank you, Peter, Arnd, Robby and Rene! If the shuttle trips could have taken place in 2009, it would have also marked 125 years of Röblingen am See - Querfurt, because the first train ran there on October 10, 1884. On July 1, 1904, the service continued on to Vitzenburg. The Schraplau lime works, now part of the Fels works, was always an important freight customer. The line is still in operation up to that point today. Later, when the impressive Querfurt grain silo was built, traffic was concentrated there. But it is also worth mentioning the busy general freight traffic over all those decades. And the long GmPs between Röblingen and Querfurt, which ran until the fall of the Berlin Wall, were a trademark of the line! Also worth mentioning is a commuter train that left Nebra at 5 a.m. via Querfurt and Mücheln to the Buna works. In the summer 1960 timetable, for example, you can still see trains that ran through to Roßleben and ensured commuter traffic to the local potash works (the connecting line had its own passenger traffic). When the Allstedt airfield was built by the Soviet Army in the 1950s, the line also acquired military significance. Not only was the Querfurt military railway built (see above), but the Querfurt and Esperstedt stations were also expanded to allow long military trains to cross. And the strategic Querfurt curve, which had never had scheduled services, was de-urbanized. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts were made to make travel more attractive, and a two-hour service was introduced. But as everywhere else, it was not possible to break the car boom and get enough travelers back on the train. This led to the cancellation of the Querfurt - Vitzenburg service at the end of 1998. The Karsdorfer Eisenbahn took over the remaining services, but this too was cancelled on December 13, 2003. The line has now largely been closed, some sections are leased. It has not been decommissioned to this day. Have a nice trip into history!