Oebisfelde - Salzwedel

The 59 km long state railway between Salzwedel and Oebisfelde was build in 1889 to serve a large area of the western part of the Altmark. Towns and villages along the line were small so passenger traffic was modest with 5 trainpairs in 1929 to 9 train pairs in 1999. Maximum speed was limited to 50 km/h, average speed was at best 41 km/h, resulting in a travel time of one and a halve hours for the total stretch.
All stations along the line were provided with freight loading and train crossing facilities and there was plenty of freight traffic in DDR times.
In later years the number of passengers fell. Drastic costsaving works like removing all unnessassy tracks at stations brought little relief. The final straw was the planned enlargement of the Mittelland Canal, which meant a costly new bridge would have to be built. Passengertraffic was subsequently halted in 2002. Freight traffic had been halted just before at a country wide rationalisation program.
In 2007 the Deutsche Regionaleisenbahn has leased the railway with the intention of restarting passenger traffic between Salswedel and Klötze. Because of the expensive new bridge it is unlikely that trains will ever ride all the way to Oebisfelde again.
(source: de.wikipedia.org)

12-05-07
In this hiking and railtracking holiday I walked from Oebisfelde to Salzwedel and from there to Hohenwulsch. You can view the first part of this expedition at Eisenbahnknoten Oebisfelde. Below is the second part starting at Oebisfelde and walking to Salzwedel.