the construction of the line in 1899 and surveying began in the same year. Construction of the line started in 1903 and lasted 15 months. The construction cost 3 million instead of the expected 4.4 million marks because, among other things, numerous temporary immigrants were involved in its construction. It commenced operations as a rack railway in August 1904. Rennsteig station was connected to the Rennsteig–Frauenwald railway from 1913 to 1965. If the route had only a local significance until the end of the Second World War, this changed after the founding of the GDR. Since East Germans initially found it difficult to travel to many more distant destinations and later were not able to reach them at all, tourism in the Thuringian Forest had its heyday. So there were through holiday trains from Schmiedefeld to Berlin; the DR timetable of 1990/1991 listed a daily train pair on the Schmiedefeld–Magdeburg route. The freight traffic on the steep Stützerbach–Schleusingen slope was discontinued on 1 January 1970. It ended on the rest of the line on 31 December 1993. After the end of communism in the GDR, express trains still ran on this secondary railway from Themar to Erfurt and in the opposite direction. Scheduled passenger services ended on the line on 23 May 1998. Operations since 1998 The line from Ilmenau to Schleusingen was taken over in 2003 by Rennsteigbahn GmbH & Co KG as train operator and infrastructure owner. It maintains the line and operates privately organised museum excursions, mostly with class 94.5–17 locomotives. Regular services were operated by the Erfurter Bahn between Ilmenau and Ilmenau Bad and on the weekends from Ilmenau to Stützerbach from the commencement of the 2006 timetable. However, this was discontinued in December 2007. At the end of 2009 there were reports that operations were planned on the weekend and public holidays from Ilmenau to Rennsteig station. This announcement was renewed in April 2014 and it was announced on Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk that a trial would run from Erfurt to Rennsteig station at least until 2016. Erfurter Bahn was to start operations on the line by extending the Erfurt–Ilmenau service to Rennsteig station every two hours on Sundays and public holidays from 15 June 2014. After Petra Enders, a member of the Landrat, had succeeded in involving neighbouring districts and transport companies in the project, Transport Minister Christian Carius refused to approve the operation because the