Hemer - Transport

Transport

Hemer is located on the highway A46, which has ended in the Iserlohn quarter of Bilveringsen just at the border of the Hemer since 1976 . The connection with another section of the A46 at Arnsberg has been delayed ever since, as the original route was supposed to go through a nature reserve in Menden.

Hemer was connected to the railway system on September 1, 1882, when the track from Menden to Hemer was inaugurated. In 1885 the extension to Iserlohn was opened. In 1891 a short track was built as far as Sundwig; it was originally planned that this should be extended to Neuenrade but the extension was never built. Hemer had two railway stations - one in Oberhemer and one in Westig. Because of a significant decline both in passenger numbers and in quantity of goods traffic, the service was wound up, and the last regular train went through Hemer on May 27, 1989. The track to Iserlohn was taken up, while the track to Menden was thereafter only used by the Bundeswehr for transporting their tanks. As the barracks are scheduled to be closed by 2007 these tracks will then fall into disuse as well.

Besides the regular railway, a narrow gauge railway using 1,000 mm (3 ft 3 3⁄₈ in) gauge first reached a municipality of the Amt Hemer in 1909, when Buchenwäldchen (Calle) was connected with Iserlohn. It was quickly extended: in 1913 almost all the municipalities of Hemer were connected to the network of the Westfälische Kleinbahnen AG. The railway was used both for a tram and for goods transport, with the railway station at Westig serving as the junction between the narrow gauge and the regular gauge railway.

Renamed Iserlohner Kreisbahn AG in 1942, operations were only briefly interrupted after World War II. In the 1950s however more and more sections of the narrow gauge railway had to be closed because they were no longer profit-making. The trams were replaced by buses, and trucks made the goods transport obsolete. In 1964 the goods transfer in Westig was closed; the trams had already closed in 1959.