On 18 December 1843, the CME was awarded the concession to build a railway line between the metropolis of
Cologne, the cities of the
Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area and Minden to connect with the network of the
Royal Hanoverian State Railways. A route through the
Bergisches Land had been dropped was due to the high cost of the engineering structures that would have been required on the advice of the
Aachen merchant and banker
David Hansemann (1790-1864), who was then briefly
Prussian Minister of Finance. Instead, the chosen route that bypassed the Bergisches Landran was selected. It ran from
Deutz (now a suburb of Cologne) further north through
Mülheim am Rhein,
Düsseldorf,
Duisburg,
Oberhausen,
Altenessen,
Gelsenkirchen,
Wanne,
Herne and
Castrop-Rauxel to
Dortmund and on to
Hamm,
Oelde,
Rheda,
Bielefeld and
Herford to
Minden. The first leg from Deutz to Düsseldorf opened on 20 December 1845. Only a few weeks later, on 9 February 1846, the second section was completed to a temporary terminus at the site of present-day
Duisburg Hauptbahnhof called the
Duisburg Cologne-Minden station, the first of three stations built on the same site. The next section from Duisburg to Hamm was opened on 15 May 1847. On 15 October 1847, the last section was opened to Minden, thus completing the entire 263 kilometre long, single track railway. The line with the
Schildesche viaduct and other engineering structures were designed for eventual duplication.
Network developments in 1847/48 On the same day as its line opened to Minden, the
Royal Hanoverian State Railways opened its
Hanover–Minden line. On 1 September 1847 the
Saxon-Silesian Railway Company opened a line connecting
Görlitz with a branch of the
Lower Silesian-Markish Railway. On 18 October 1847 the
Upper Silesian Railway reached the border station of
Mysłowice. On 13 October 1847
Kraków-Upper Silesian Railway opened. The opening of several hundred kilometres of railway lines in September and October 1847 together with other lines opened in the previous few years, created a continuous rail link from the Rhine via
Brunswick,
Oschersleben,
Magdeburg,
Dresden and
Wrocław to the
Vistula river. The lines from Berlin to Magdeburg and Wrocław were opened in the previous year, but until 1851 there was no rail connection between the various railway stations in Berlin. With the opening of a connecting line between the Wrocław stations on 3 February 1848, it was connected to the Upper Silesian Railway and the Kraków–Upper Silesian railway, creating a continuous rail link from Deutz to
Kraków. Less than a year later on 1 September 1848, the
William Railway (
Wilhelmsbahn) was opened from
Koźle to
Bohumín (now in the
Czech Republic, then in the
Austrian Empire), closing the gap between the Upper Silesian Railway and the
Austrian Northern Railway, which had opened to Bohumín on 1 April 1847. This created a continuous rail link between Cologne and
Vienna. ==Current significance ==