On a warm summer evening, the Berlin - Frankfurt train heads west through the Mexikoplatz S-Bahnhof.
Reichsbahn employees were proud of this series, at least in comparison to stories about locomotives from before and after. Economic necessity led to the rebuilding of many steam engines in the 1950's, and that program was compounded by political necessity:
"The Diesel locomotive in Germany, due to the scarcity of Diesel oil, has no future."
-- F. Meinecke, Konstruktionsgedanken im Diesellokomotivbau, in Die Konstruktion, Issue 3, 1951.
This safely parroted the policy of the Soviet Union in that era, where brutal railway boss Lazar Kaganovich ordered his own purges of railway executives and staff through the era in which western railway companies and engine suppliers developed efficient Diesel power. Frequent imprisonments and executions of employees discouraged innovative thinking.
When regime change put Kaganovich and his satellites out of the picture in 1957, engineering and operating personnel in the East Bloc worked to catch up. With their heritage of pre-World War II and wartime experience, the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) development moved quickly.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of the Deutsche Reichsbahn's personnel, the East's response to the creation of the European Common Market, COMECON, decreed that Soviet diesels would become the standard for main line operation. Thus, new Soviet locomotives began to appear on GDR rails in 1966. These, as was common with Russian practice, were influenced by American, rather than European, concepts (Soviet Railways were in love with the Milwaukee Road, which is another story.). This is reasonable, given that the economy served and the great distances in the Soviet Union made its rail operations somewhat like the conditions experienced in the U.S. The commodities handled and the operating circumstances were not similar on the Reichsbahn.
They were glowingly reviewed in GDR publications, but I gained the impression
from railwaymen and from seeing how they were utilized that they were unsatisfactory.
At a glance, the smoke that they produced was reminiscent of the Milwaukee's
Fairbanks-Morse road engines of my childhood in the 1950's.
Couchette cars (Liegewagen) were referred to as "troop sleepers" -- but appeared to be stock Deutsche Bundesbahn Second Class couchette cars. These had berths for six passengers in each of nine compartments, with the tenth compartment being used by the West German porter and for bedding storage. Restrooms were at the ends of the car. I was told that in a wartime situation, that troops would use their own bedding in such a car. The rooms could be made up into conventional modern 6-seat German Second Class seating.
"Hospital train cars" were older, and had attractive woodwork in their interiors. They included two-berth and four-berth rooms. A two-berth room shared a bathroom with an adjacent two-berth room. As rooms on the U.S. train were booked on a combination of space available and rank, I was able to have one of the two-berth rooms to myself when I rode the Bremerhaven train in the winter. On the popular Frankfurt train in the summer, I found myself sharing space with five other GI's in one of the couchette cars.
In this photo, the last "passenger" car visible is what was known as the "PBR Car" (I never learned what that stood for!), and it was what American railroaders call a "combine" -- with baggage space and passenger compartments. The compartments were occupied by the Train Commander, the Train Interpreter, the Transportation Corps Conductor, the Train Radio Operator, Military Police, and the Deutsche Reichsbahn conductor (Zugfuehrer). In this photo, a white smudge at one window may be an M.P.
In addition to baggage, the PBR car carried package shipments as Express. On one nice Berlin morning, I found that there were no pastries in the PX Snack Bar at Andrews Barracks. The clerk explained to me that they were "bumped" off the train from Frankfurt by a higher priority shipment. The higher priority? Playboy magazine. Normally, it was split into two loads, but had been delivered late from the States, so it was sent through as a single shipment.
The car behind (to the left) is a Railway Post Office car. The U.S. trains carried what Americans would call First Class mail for the Deutsche Bundespost and the Berlin postal service. This provided secure transportation for letters to and from places such as Giessen and Kassel, which were too close to Berlin for air transport to make sense. In this photo, the Post horn symbol is barely visible on the car.
A fine exhibit on cross-border mail was shown at the Berlin U.S. Military Veterans Association 2002 Reunion in Berlin. The Marienfelde Refugee Center Museum hosted the Union of Berlin Philatelic Organizations in a showing of collected postmarks and other documentation of this period, including Allied mail services and the Berlin civilian postal service in the post-World War II era.
On the Bremerhaven train, the last car was usually a refrigerator car (known as a "reefer" to American railroaders), which brought our milk, eggs and cheese from Denmark.
--rwr--
Bibliography:
Conquest, Robert; The Great Terror - a reassessment; Oxford University Press; New York 1990.
Glatte, Wolfgang, Dipl.-Ing. and Reinhardt, Lothar, Ing.; Diesellok-Archiv; Transpress, VEB Verlag fuer Verkehrswesen; Berlin 1970.
Kunicki, Heins; Deutsche Dieseltriebefahrzeuge - Gestern und Heute; VEB Verlag fuer Verkehrswesen; Berlin 1968.
Read a story of the Berlin Military Trains.
Read about the Flag Orders needed for travel through the Soviet Zone.
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