- This article is part of the history of rail transport
by country series

Railways in Denmark in 1932
DSB
lines in red
The
history of rail transport in Denmark began in 1847
with the opening of a railway line between Copenhagen
and Roskilde
.
The
Kiel
-Altona
line in
Holstein was completed three years earlier,
but the region had been lost to the German Confederation
in the Second
War of Schleswig.
The Danish
national railway company, DSB
, was
established in 1885. Until recently, DSB took care of most
aspects of rail operation, but the liberalisation efforts during
the 1990s have resulted in several tasks being branched off into
other companies.
Early steps
In the
1830s, England and North Germany planned to construct a railway
line between the cities of Hamburg
and Lübeck
to ease transport between the North Sea
and the Baltic Sea
. The Copenhagen government frowned on this, as
they wanted to retain waterway traffic through Oresund
, but to
preempt these efforts, the Danish government set up the first
Danish railway commission in 1835 to establish the layout of a
railway line through the Duchy of Holstein. Consequently, the railway between Altona
and Kiel
was opened
by King Christian VIII on
September 18, 1844. However, the Duchy of Holstein was only in
personal union with Denmark, with the
King of Denmark being Duke of Holstein, and as a result of the
Second War of Schleswig,
Holstein was ceded to the German Confederation
in 1864. The railway line was not the first
in what constituted Denmark at the time (as Holstein was part of
the German Confederation), but it was nonetheless the first to be
built under the Danish monarchy.
In 1840,
technician Søren Hjorth and
accountant Johan Christian
Gustav Schram published the paper Jærnbane mellem
Kjøbenhavn og Roeskilde, in which they argued that a railway
between Copenhagen
and Roskilde
would be
profitable. However, there was no further interest in this
project until 1841, when cooperation with
Industriforeningen had been established.
In 1843,
after substantial financial recalculations, they applied for a
concession to construct a railway from Copenhagen via Roskilde to a
coastal town on West Zealand
. This was granted about a year later, albeit
not with the same level of governmental economic support as the
Kiel-Altona line.
On
July 2,
1844,
Det
sjællandske Jernbaneselskab (The
Railway Company of Zealand) was
established with Hjorth and Schram among the board of directors.
Amidst considerable resistance from landowners, trouble with
unstable labour and excessive expenditures, the economic resources
necessary to complete the line were provided, and the
Copenhagen-Roskilde line was opened, as the first in Denmark, on
June 26,
1847. English
engineer
William Radford
led construction.
Sharp
Brothers & Co., in Manchester
, England built the initial batch of locomotives,
the first of which was named 'Odin'.
Expansion

Railway line in Denmark at the turn of
the 1900s
Following ratification of the
Danish Constitution in 1849, there
was political will to improve trade routes to England and provide
better connections between Copenhagen and the rest of the country.
The
primary means for this was to extend the Copenhagen-Roskilde line
to Korsør
, on the west
coast of Zealand. During the 1850s, sufficient funding to
extend the line to Korsør was secured, and the new segment was
opened on
April 26,
1856.
Before
the First War of Schleswig,
plans had been made in Schleswig to construct a railway from
Flensburg
, via Husum
, to Tönning
to limit German influence on trade. However,
these plans were hampered by the war and the new political system.
In 1852, the construction company
Peto, Brassey & Betts
(represented in
Scandinavia by
Samuel Morton Peto) was granted
concession to build the line, which opened on
October 6,
1854. The railway
was very successful, carrying English transit goods until 1857,
when the
Oresund toll was
abolished.
References
- Koed, Jan (1997). Danmarks Jernbaner i 150 år.
Forlaget Kunst og Kultur. ISBN 87-7600-199-7.
External links