section (Frankfurt (Oder) – Bunzlau) of the Lower Silesian-Märkisch Railway was opened, linking the two great cities of Prussia, Berlin and Breslau. At the same time the main line of the Upper Silesian Railway that started in Breslau reached Gleiwitz in October of that year. Within three years the railway network in the German Confederation had more than doubled in length. Three and a half months later, on 15 December 1846, the Berlin-Hamburg Railway went into service: a diagonal connection between the two largest cities of what became the German Empire. Likewise in 1846 the Main-Neckar Railway from Frankfurt (Main) to Mannheim and Heidelberg went into service. Central European network In the north the line from Celle to Harburg owned by the Hanoverian State Railway in the Kingdom of Hanover reached Harburg on the River Elbe on 1 May 1847. In autumn of that year continuous east-west links were established: On 1 September 1847 the Saxon-Silesian Railway Company connected the railway network Lower Silesia to Central Germany when it opened the Dresden–Gorlitz railway. On 15 October 1847 the last section of the Cologne-Minden Railway and the Minden branch of the Hanoverian State Railway were opened simultaneously creating the first through railway link from the Rhine to the Oder via Berlin. The route was more complicated than today however: the link from Brunswick to Magdeburg ran, in July 1843, via Wolfenbüttel, Jerxheim and Oschersleben to Magdeburg. Until the completion of the Buckau Railway Bridge in 1848, traffic from Berlin ended at the station of Magdeburg-Friedrichstadt on the eastern bank of the Elbe. After crossing the Elbe, passengers had to re-board the train at Schleinufer (Elbbahnhof), the terminus of the line from Oschersleben. Berlin's termini were not linked within the city until 1851, when the Berlin Link Railway entered service. On 18 October 1847, there was a continuous line from Breslau to Cracow for the first time when the Upper Silesian Railway was linked to the Cracow-Upper Silesian Railway. With the completion of the railway within Breslau on 3 February 1848 that connected its termini, there was now a continuous rail link from the Rhine to the Vistula And with the closure of a short gap between the William Railway in Upper Silesia and the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway in Austrian Silesia on 1 September 1848, the first contiguous Central European network was formed, reaching as far as Deutz, right of the