thick, were fastened onto the Straßbäumen, again with wooden nails. The track gauge was initially just 82 cm. The line was one Prussian mile. On 20 September 1831, the Deilthal Railway was ceremonially opened by Prince William, a son of the Prussian king, Frederick William II, and was to be called from then on the Prince William Railway Company (PWE). Until 1844 it was operated as a wagonway for the transportation of coal, but as early as 1833 passenger wagons were available "for enjoyment". In 1847, the railway was converted to standard gauge and was worked between Steele South and Vohwinkel as a steam-driven railway with the name Steele-Vohwinkel Railway (Steele-Vohwinkler Eisenbahn). The trackbed is used today by S-Bahn line no. 9. The majority and official view, however, is that the Bavarian Ludwig Railway, built in 1835 by the private Ludwig Railway Company in Nuremberg (Ludwigs-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft in Nürnberg) by engineer Paul Camille von Denis, was the first railway in Germany, because it introduced the new type of steam engine. It was officially opened on 7 December 1835 with a journey from Nuremberg to Fürth after earlier test runs had been carried out with the locomotive Adler, built by Stephenson and Co. in Newcastle upon Tyne. The Englishman William Wilson drove the locomotive on this first journey and became the first engine driver in Germany. In contemporary publications, this first journey by a steam locomotive was seen as the beginning of a new era. The decision of the Ludwig Railway Company to opt for the English system, including its rail profile and track gauge, flanges, wagons and so on, also had a normative effect because subsequently, the German railways adopted the same standards based on what was clearly a mature system. The development of the German railway network bypassed this line and it was never connected to other railways. Finally, it had to compete with electric trams running between Nuremberg and Fürth. On 31 October 1922, it was closed and used for a tramway. This was followed by the first railway in Prussia, the Berlin-Potsdam Railway: the 11-kilometre-long stretch from Zehlendorf to Potsdam which opened on 22 September 1838; its 12-kilometre extension from Zehlendorf to Berlin was opened on 29 October 1838. From 1 December 1838, the Duchy of Brunswick State Railway operated between Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel. This was the first railway in Germany to be in state ownership, probably intended