Thrills, sporting challenges and fun: the flowtrail in burgsinn is supposed to offer all this to local cyclists and tourists. It is the long-awaited dream of some mountain bike enthusiasts from the market community.
The winding course of the 2.2-kilometer-long trail in the forest is intended to make cyclists feel like they're on a roller coaster when they're hurtling down it. Artificial wooden structures, over which mountain bikers can ride and jump, give the downhill run the additional character of an obstacle course. But when does the runway actually open to the public??
A brief review: in october 2014, the burgsinn market town council had already approved a building application for the bike trail. After that, there were numerous site inspections with authorities, the project group around torsten auth had to correct the route of the path several times, and the question of financing also caused disagreement.
The offer of a planning office was too expensive for the municipal council in 2018 – the complete construction probably cost at least 50,000 euros. Nevertheless, the municipality made around 25,000 euros available over a period of four years. At least a partial extension of the route was to be paid for in this way.
The mountain bikers from burgsinn collected further money via the crowdfundig platform of raiffeisenbank main-spessart. Initial work on designing the track with a mini excavator then began in january 2019. A short time later, a video of a test ride appeared on the youtube platform, in which the first structures such as small wooden bridges can already be seen on the flowtrail.
But then it became quiet around the project. "Unfortunately, we cannot officially reopen the line at the moment, nor can we give a date for an opening", it says in the last status message on the website of the project group from june last year. "It was not so the train behind it", confirms project officer torsten auth.
The explanation is simple: the flowtrail is built exclusively by volunteers. This meant that the project could not be completed in the same time as a professional company could do it.
No companies found
The original idea was to have at least some of the work done by other companies, but this was not the case. But that did not work out. "Unfortunately, we can't find any interested companies at the moment. With full order books, the volume of orders here is too low", the initiative burgsinn wrote about it last year on facebook. "But it is not so bad", says torsten auth. Learning a lot by doing it yourself.
Since torsten auth, the head of the group of around ten volunteers, has recently been traveling a lot for work, progress has been sporadic. But that should change now. "We will now start to build more strongly again in october." All necessary building material is now available. Auth: "our goal is to open in spring, when the season begins." The trail should then be accessible free of charge every day from april to october. But it also depends on how quickly a permit is issued, says auth. Finally, experts must also check whether the wooden structures are safe to ride on.
But then the time finally came. As auth reports, the group has already put well over 500 hours of work into the construction of the flowtrail – not counting planning. There are more flowtrails in bad orb (hesse), at the kreuzberg in the rhon and in eibelstadt (wurzburg district). Corbinian Wildmeister