Connecting the dots - a photo on Flickriver

The need to visit this particular place came to me, while i was studying the cable car railway to the Janikowo soda plant. When tracing its route going from Janikowo we first see the station, where carts were separated between Inowrocław and Janikowo, then it crosses a lake and continues through the fields towards the Bielawy quarry. There is a catch however, as the cable car railway stops some 2 kilometers before the actual quarry/cement plant. How have I not noticed this before?

But the curiosities don't stop there. Naturally the cable cars have to get their load somehow, and to my great surprise and utmost amazement - this is done with a standard railway, which runs here from the cement plant, at a length of around 2,5km. At the end, the wagons are unloaded and the load is transferred to the cable car. Crazy!

I dug deeper. As it turns out, the station is reffered to as K1 (which is why I jokingly call it Masherbrum) and I found many reports of former workers, who talked about the railway on various forums. But... no pictures from here existed! The industry enthusiasts photographed the transloading facility itself, some bus-lovers shot pictures of busses with the station and cable car, which served as a background, but seemingly no railfan has ever step foot here. That made me curious, maybe the train doesn't run in the end? Checking areal photos from the place out of 3 different sources I found around 20 shots taken across the span of the past 15 years. Only around half of them had any traffic on this station, maybe that was why, maybe this doesn't run very often...

Nevertheless, me and a friend of mine from the region embarked on a journey. We came in the morning and... there it was, a train was just unloading on the station! Our excitement was short-lived though, as our car's tire had burst before we even reached it, which stopped us significantly. But no matter. It turns out that the train had been here for the rest of the day. It looks as if they only unloaded one wagon each hour (or even fewer). I think the train comes here only every 2 days and stays here for unloading.

To connect all the dots, as in the title, I need to add on another bit of information, which was also very interesting to me. The reports of workers, which I had mentioned earlier talk about EL2 locomotives being used to bring the cargo wagons here. Sure enough, one of the former catenary pylons is hiding just behind the locomotive on this picture, as the train is leaving K1 towards the quarry, headed by SM42-2083. Some of the pylons even retained their original designations and each one of them is marked with the designation "K1". I think this is the first picture published on the internet, which features this place and a train.

One last thing are the wagons. They are only used on this line and they are made up of the type 41W, which were manufactured in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski (1952-1959) and Wrocław (1960-1964). The factories each had their own little details on carriages and this helped me determine that both the producers supplied the wagons to this industrial railway. My rough estimate is that the plant currently has around 100 such wagons in use, and they only are used for internal transports to K1.

I hope you enjoyed the trillogy about Wapienno's internal railways.

Photo by Piotrek/Toprus

Taken on: January 28, 2025

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stacja

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linowa

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Sets appears in: • Piotrek • Diesel locomotives more » • SM42/SP42/SU42 locomotives • Poland/Polska - Trains/Pociągi « less

Groups appears in: • East European Trains

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark III, f/3.2, 1/250 sec, 70mm, ISO 640 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Aperture:	f/3.2
Exposure Time:	0.004 sec (1/250)
Focal Length:	70mm
ISO:	640
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
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Software:	RawTherapee 5.8
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