Visiting A Closed Railway

On our way home from a company event a colleague/friend and I visited the remnants of a metre gauge railway closed and lifted in 1930. Despite being closed so long ago, surprisingly many traces remain, including several station buildings, bridges and long sections of embankments. While the station buildings may interest some, I find the bridges and earth works much more interesting. Probably because they have more relevance for the type of industrial railways I'm interested in. I have a hard time visiting dismantled railway lines without imagining how they would look in model fitted with scale track and trains.

Kolding-Egtved Railway was a small private railway wirh a gauge of 1000 mm and a length of 27.8 km. While the track was lifted in 1930 there are still many traces of the railway. Here is a cutting northeast of Almind. Obviously the cutting still carries traffic today.

Northeast of the small town of Almind there is a 600 m long very well preserved combination of cutting and embankment easily accessible from a gravel road. The curved cutting leads to an, by Danish narrow gauge standards, impressive embankment over a stream.

The northern end of the embankment. The terrain falls steeply to a stream led under the embankment in a small tunnel. 

The tunnel leading the stream through the embankment is built from stone blocks and red bricks.

A view through the tunnel shows how the construction is in a near perfect state despite almost 90 years without maintenance. How well would a construction built today survive without maintenance?

The top of the Almind embankment is well cleared and showing trace of regular traffic. 

Further north in the small town of Gravens two steel girder bridges are preserved and marked as local heritage locations. From the former station building in Gravens, one can follow the old railway line for almost 3.5 km to the next station Brakker. Most of the distance laid out as a bike path or gravel road.

The preserved bridge east of Gravens. The bridge west of Gravens is of the same type, but the girders much heavier attacked by rust.

Kolding-Egtved Railway was opened in 1898 and built with 12.4 kg/m rails and untreated pine sleepers. Some of these were quickly replaced by steel sleepers as rot set in.

KEJ M 1, a petrol powered AEG-railcar with a single bogie coach in Kolding 1930. The number of spectators could indicate that this might be the last train on the line?

KEJ in the proces of dismantling. The work party is working uphill towards Kolding.