ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how suburban transport developed when caught between the conflicting motivations of profit and welfare in several German cities in the Rhine valley. Cities like Mainz, Darmstadt and Mannheim were in structure and size quite typical of major cities in the south of Germany outside the large industrial and metropolitan agglomerations. In 1895 Bachstein and the Bank for Trade and Industry consolidated the local lines which had been formally independent up to that point into the joint-stock company Suddeutsche Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft with its headquarters in Darmstadt. The company, henceforth called South German, initially had an invested capital of 11.4 million marks; its share capital quickly rose from 6.5 million to 21.6 million in 1899. In the 1880s, cities like Mainz, Darmstadt and Mannheim with some 40-80,000 inhabitants, where Bachstein and the Bank constructed their lines, seemed happy about this traffic improvement.
