Rhine, in the west, Harburg in the north, Warsaw and Cracow in the east and as far as Gloggnitz at the northern foot of the Semmering Pass in the south. Among the northern lines there were still small gaps in Berlin and Hamburg. In the following year, 1849, a connexion from Berlin to Kassel via Halle (Saale)/Gerstungen was established when the Halle–Bebra railway owned by the Thuringian Railway and the Frederick William Northern Railway in the Electorate of Hesse were completed. The connexion of the southern German states of Baden and Bavaria took somewhat longer: Berlin – Frankfurt/Main (Main-Weser Railway, 1852), continuing via Mannheim (Main-Neckar Railway) to Freiburg im Breisgau (Rhine Valley Railway, 1855) Berlin – Munich (Ludwig South-North Railway, 1853) European network Following the takeover of Cöln-Crefeld Railway at the turn of 1855/56, the Rhenish Railway Company, which was founded to build the line to Belgium, began work on a railway from Cologne upriver along a section of the left bank of the Rhine. This line reached Rolandseck on 1 January 1857, Bingerbrück in 1859, today Bingen Central Station, to where in the same year the main line of the Hessian Ludwig Railway was extended, linking Mainz with Ludwigshafen from 1853. With the opening of Cologne's Cathedral Bridge on 3 October 1859 the west European rail network, consisting of the French and Belgian networks and German lines west of the Rhine, were joined to the central European network that, meanwhile, had been extended to Flensburg, Königsberg (Prussia) (now Kaliningrad), Rzeszów in Galicia, Hungary beyond the Theiß, and to Triest on the Mediterranean. In 1860 the Prussian Eastern Railway was extended to the Russian border beyond Eydtkuhnen (today Chernyshevskoye) in German East Prussia. With the opening of the branch from Vilnius (German: Wilna)–Kaunas–Virbalis (German: Wirballen, Russian: Вержболово and Polish: Wierzbałowo) on the Saint Petersburg–Warsaw Railway to this border crossing near Kybartai, the first junction between the European standard gauge and the Russian broad gauge networks was established. State railway ambitions The governing bodies of the German states had differing attitudes to the railway. Some left the initiative to private operators, others attempted to establish a state-owned railway, especially in the southern German monarchies of the Grand Duchy of Baden, Kingdom of Bavaria and Duchy of Württemberg. Prussia, on the other hand, initially encouraged private railways, but later took several railway companies into state ownership that had run into financial difficulties,