Volkswagan Plants to Make Bus Again
Volkswagen recently celebrated six decades of production at its VW Hannover factory in Federal republic of germany. Nosotros explore the story backside the purpose-built constitute that has produced six generations of the VW Transporter. Join u.s.a. for a trip dorsum in fourth dimension!
It started with a sketch…
The Bus concept was showtime thought upwardly past Dutch businessman Ben Pon, who was interim as an amanuensis for VW at the time. He was really the start person to consign a Beetle outside of Germany. Pon famously did a sketch of a boxy commercial vehicle back in 1947 just it wasn't until May 1949 that Volkswagen Md Heinz Nordhoff gave it the become-ahead. The Type 2 went into production at Wolfsburg on 12thursday Nov 1949, although just eight examples had been built past the stop of the year. Industry got going in the new year and Volkswagen built 8,509 vehicles by the end of 1950 but, with accent on the growing market for the Beetle, merely a small-scale fraction were Transporters.
Moving out of Wolfsburg
Nonetheless, Autobus orders kept coming, and despite 242,373 vehicles beingness built at Wolfsburg in 1952, just 40,199 were Type 2s. With so much of the manufactory set aside for Beetle production, just eighty Buses could exist made a 24-hour interval and to make matters worse, the Transporter was offered in thirty different variations which did nothing for the logistics. Information technology soon became clear that a dedicated Transporter production facility was needed, just the question was where to build it? Offers came flooding in from cities and towns throughout West Germany all keen to do good from the huge income the new factory would bring. One such offer came from Stöcken well-nigh Hannover with its large railway yard on one side and the Mittelland Canal which ran to Wolfsburg on the other; it was perfect.
First stone laid in 1955
All of the architectural piece of work was carried out in-business firm by the VW Edifice Blueprint Department and externally the new factory had visual similarities with Wolfsburg, with its characteristic saw-tooth roof. Nordhoff laid the foundation stone on March i, 1955, just information technology was a rather different affair to the 1 seen at Wolfsburg in May 1938 when Hitler laid the foundation rock in front end of lxxx,000 people. This fourth dimension the much smaller crowd was mostly made upwardly of employees and builders, and the ground had a covering of snowfall. As the snow thawed, the site became a mud bath leaving construction lorries stuck and an urgent requirement for purpose-built access roads. Due to the sheer scale of the construction, various temporary buildings were erected as site offices and housing for the workers. Later on three months the workforce had grown to 2,000. At that place were 30 cranes on site working around the clock and cement mixers churned out 5,000 cubic meters of concrete per 24-hour interval, creating 600,000 foursquare slabs. A heed-boggling 256,000 truckloads of earth were removed from the site in total.
Trained and ready to build buses!
Long before the new plant was completed, Volkswagen employed iii,000 people, in readiness for manufacture moving to Hannover. Staff grooming was key, and VW paid for a defended daily iv am railroad train service to transport the new workers from Hannover to the Wolfsburg factory, where they were taught how to build a Type 2 from a big pile of Splitscreen Bus parts!
Past February 1956 the building was virtually finished and logistical essentials such as 10km of railway had been laid providing connection directly into the constitute. On viiith March 1956, the first exam of the new VW Type 2 Transporter production line was carried out. Total serial production began on twentythursday April, with around 250 vehicles existence produced per day. This number soon rose to 300 units, and by the end of the yr, 62,500 vehicles had been made at Hannover. Come 1962, when the One-Millionth Type two rolled of the production line, 700-800 Buses were being made every twenty-four hours.
Engine plant within the VW Hannover factory
As well as churning out Buses, VW fabricated the decision to build a new factory within the Hannover confines. This would concentrate specifically on building air-cooled engines, Type 1 beams, Type 2 front suspension and rear transaxles. Piece of work started on 'Hall 2' on 20th October 1957 and once the new building had been added, the combined frontage was now close to beingness one-half a mile in length. The engine product lines fabricated 1,000 engines every day, nearly of which were destined for Wolfsburg and transported past rail. The consummate Type 1 front end and rear cease assemblies were also transported by rail to Wolfsburg. Hall 2 went on to produce not only the Type 1 engine, just also Blazon 3 'pancake', Type 4 and later water-cooled engines, including the T25 Wasser-Boxer.
In July 1967, during the annual mill holiday closure, Hall 1 and 2 at Hannover was re-tooled ready for product of new Bay Window parts and vehicles, and by 1968 production of the Blazon 2 passed ii million vehicles. In 1980 the Bay was replaced by the Blazon 25 and past 1981 the factory had built 5 million 'Type two' Buses since its birth dorsum in the fifties.
Hannover in modern times
In 1990 the forepart-wheel-drive the T4 Transporter entered production, followed by the VW T5 Transporter in 2004, the T5.1 in 2009 and the T6 from 2015. Along with the Volkswagen Type 2, VW Hannover has made the VW Load Transporter (LT), Taro Pick-Up, 26,531 Type 181s, 2600 Basistransporter CKD kits, MAN Trucks and today the Amarok and the bodies of Porsche Panameras are produced hither.
Hopefully, you take found this rummage through the history files of the VW Hannover manufactory interesting. Even if you don't drive a VW Transporter, the photos are a wonderful trip downward memory lane. Ian / Andy
Source: https://www.heritagepartscentre.com/uk/blog/where-your-bus-was-made-vw-hannover-factory.html
0 Response to "Volkswagan Plants to Make Bus Again"
Post a Comment