Mountain panorama from Aulendorf
Lush meadows, pretty rivers, broad panoramas, baroque churches – the delights of Upper Swabia are there for all to see from the railway carriage window. For the Deutsche Bahn train drivers, the Ulm to Friedrichshafen line is their everyday fare.
“Even though it’s such a familiar route to me, it's still something special to see the view open up to the Swiss mountains after Aulendorf,” says Andreas Wentzel. As a train driver with Deutsche Bahn he travels this route on a regular basis. “The Südbahn line is an attractive and very wellused route. With connections to Lake Constance,
Switzerland and Austria, this region is one of the most important in the whole country for tourism,” Wentzel observes. The service is busy with commuters in the morning and evening rush hours, and used by schoolchildren, locals and tourists during the day. “Whatever the time of day, the trains are nearly always full,” he says.
Freight services since the 1900s
In the early 19th century, the question of transporting goods from Germany to Switzerland and on to Italy was more important than passenger services. The construction of a canal was considered an alternative to the railway at
the time. But building a railway line proved the better solution. Multiple routes that could join up to form a network of northern, western, eastern and southern lines were to serve the transport needs of the then Kingdom of Württemberg.
