Our 2025 AGM will be held in Basel and will focus on the Rhine ports. To get you in the mood for the AGM, I would like to remind you of an industrial railway in this railway history story.
Basel’s Kleinhüningen harbour is used for the transhipment of goods arriving by ship on the Rhine from Germany or Holland. It was established in the 1920s with an extensive railway network, which is served from Basel Badischer Bahnhof.
In 1948, a company called SATRAM (Société Anonyme de TRAnsbordement et Manutention, the name is French!) was founded to take over this activity. The SATRAM-Huiles (Oils) division used a railway track located on the banks of the Rhine and close to the German border. It was used for tankers waiting to be loaded with petrol and oil. Due to the limited space available, the usual points at the end of such a siding were replaced by a transfer table on which the shunting locomotive stood.
SATRAM-Huiles bought a small Breuer tractor to shunt the wagons, but it was probably too weak, which is why it was converted into a slightly larger locomotive around 1955. In 1993, SATRAM bought a second-hand Köf II tractor (no. 323 803-7) from 1960 from the German Federal Railway and gave it the number Tm 2/2 1. It performed well, which led to the demolition of the first locomotive in 1996.
Since 1983, SATRAM (except SATRA-Huiles) has been part of Rhenus, the group that operates a large part of the port of Basel and its railway activities. The SATRAM-Huiles track system was decommissioned in 2016 and the Köf II tractor was sold to the Agrivap tourist railway in Ambert in the south of France in 2017.
For comments and additions to this railway history, please contact our Vice President Edi Meier. Thank you for your help.
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