1. In accordance with USAREUR Circular 550-180, the following actions are prohibited aboard military trains:
a. Purchase or drinking of intoxicating liquour.
b. Jumping on or off moving trains.
c. Pulling emergency brakes (Notbremse) except in case of actual emergency.
d. Extending the head or limbs out of windows.
e. Throwing lighted cigarettes, cigars, matches or any dangerous or unsightly articles from trains.
f. Taking pictures between Berlin and Helmstedt.
g. Speaking to or attempting to converse with East German nationals or Soviet personnel while train is in the Soviet Zone of Germany.
h. Inconsiderate littering of compartments with refuse or food particles.
2. The privacy of an individual's compartment does not exempt him from
compliance with the above directions.
On arrival at your destination, you must check and re-confirm your return booking with the local Berlin Booking Office. If you are traveling on a "space-available" (non-duty) status, there is no guarantee regarding the type of accommodations you will be furnished on your return trip. Duty travelers have priority.
The military crew on board each passenger train is responsible for your
safe passage throughout the entire trip. Your cooperation and compliance
with the pertinent rules and regulations will insure you a safe and comfortable
journey. For those of you who are coming to Berlin, we of the Berlin
Brigade wish you a pleasant stay in the "divided city". [Note
use of the German style for quote marks inside the sentence-ending period.]
For those of you leaving, "Auf Wiedersehn" and "Good Luck".
US Train Conductor: A non-commissioned officer who acts as liaison between passengers and railway operating personnel and who exercises technical supervision over each train to insure the best possible service and comfort to the passengers.
Military Police: MP's are placed aboard Berlin trains to maintain law and order, provide security, and perform other duties as required.
Interpreter: A individual [stet], fluent in Russian, who is designated to act as translator-interpreter for the train commander with Soviet checkpoint officer.
Radio Operator: [no information offered]
Porters (Schaffner): West-German employees of Deutsche Schlafwagen-Gesellschaft (roughly equivalent to Pullman Co). Tipping is authorized for the personnel [stet] services rendered by these individuals.
Conductor (Zugfuehrer): Both East and West German conductors
ride on the train in their respective areas.
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Conduct: these clear-cut rules were enforced. At the booking office in Berlin we had a blacklist posted over the inside of the ticket window, naming people who were no longer authorized to ride the duty trains. They would have to pay for their own air travel or drive the stressful Autobahn between Checkpoints Bravo and Alpha.
Train Commander: typically a First Lieutenant.
As a rule of thumb, there was a core of the train commander staff who were
Transportation Corps officers, augmented by officers from other branches.
The quality of the latter varied greatly. As an interesting sidelight,
the folder does not mention the Senior Officer on the train. Each
night, about the time that the train began to roll, one of the military
train crew would work their way through the corridors to the compartment
of the officer who had been determined to be the most senior "combat arms"
officer on the train that night. We would not necessarily know who
that was until we had gone through every passenger's paperwork.
Reactions when they were notified varied. Some were honored or intrigued by this brief distinction, adding a bit of color to their account of riding the famous duty train. Some were concerned about whether they might have to actually do something-- there were hundreds of uneventful trips, but if something happened, what were they expected to do? After all, if you were in pajamas ready for bed, would you be pleased when a bemused Private First Class knocks on your door and announces that you have just been put in theoretical charge of two hundred rather diverse Americans going through a part of the world possibly unfamiliar to you?
US Train Conductor: In contrast to the Train Commander position, I believe that this job was always filled with a "trained" railway conductor from the Transportation Corps. Army rail operations go back to the U.S. Civil War, when General Herman Haupt organized the Railroad Corps after numerous incidents and fiascoes involving Federal troops and the railway personnel. The British, with a smaller military in mind, combined the Conductor and Commander jobs into the post of Train Conducting Warrant Officer (TCWO). These, too, were professionals.
At least one of the conductors who I met was continuing to accumulate seniority on a U.S. railway, because he had been drafted for the Korean War. They worked through from West Germany (I believe from their base in Mannheim), so when the Berlin-based train commander was turning back in Helmstedt, the Train Conductor was in charge west of there.
Military Police: These soldiers came from the Railway Police unit based in Frankfurt, and were supplemented with men from the Berlin 287th MP Company on the Berlin-Helmstedt segment.
Interpreter: This was the only position which would be filled by either a German civilian or a U.S. soldier. Due to the shortage of U.S. personnel who could qualify as Russian-English interpreters, at least three Germans worked the trains while I was there. One of them, Mr. Pachurka (or Pachurcka) was the interpreter on the last train. Another, Willi ________ , originated the special "Flag Orders" in the early days of the train, after originally typing all the lines of each order on his manual typewriter. Peter ________ was the third.
Radio Operator: It would seem that this position is self-explanatory, but there were some special reasons to value this soldier's work in the crew. The radio operator was usually the only person who knew where we were in the night. He would radio what railroaders call an "O.S." signal to the Brigade Headquarters as we went through each station. By this means, Brigade could tell about where we were, and that we were (hopefully) moving as planned. While passengers assumed that we always knew where we were, our work would distract us, and a look out the window into the dark night of dimly lit East Germany would not help. By checking with the radio operator, we could know which landmark to watch for or feel ourselves clattering through next on the ocean of rails.
The radio operator did his work through a code book of the U.S. Army's basic, throwaway codes. When a significant military activity was observed, such as a Soviet Army convoy waiting at a grade crossing (level crossing in British terminology), we would come up with a consensus as to what we had seen, and the radio operator would encode a message to Brigade. Of course, this mainly could help in terms of the number of occurrences-- we were not providing detailed intelligence by this coincidental method. My favorite mental image is of watching out the open window on a warm night, and spotting a line of Soviet trucks (Zil-157 or related types) stretching into the dark, waiting for us at a crossing.
The German railway employees used to do things to irk the Soviets, and it is possible that they chose to hold this convoy up on purpose. The typical crossing in East Germany was an old Deutsche Reichsbahn facility with hand-operated gates, which could also be a legitimate reason for bringing them down well before a speeding passenger train was due. For whatever reason, some of the Soviet soldiers had dismounted for smokes. Against the glare of their headlights, they were cardboard silhouettes to us. They would have seen our conventional Reichsbahn diesel engine, and then the long train of dark-green cars, with their headlights lighting our Transportation Corps lettering on each car.
And then we were in the dark again.... and where was that crossing? With the help of the radio operator, we figured out a likely location and he sent the message off. The Soviet soldiers mounted their trucks and headed off across the tracks behind us. Somewhere, the message worked its way through our intelligence system, and, as always in Berlin stories, we can assume that somewhere an East German or Soviet radio monitor sat at a desk and worked out a decoding of our message. Since we changed codes nightly, this probably required more work than it was worth.
Thus for a few moments, the two wary armies would face each other, and our tiny contact would be noted by both sides. The Cold War was often like that.
Porters (Schaffner): I had occasion to chat with several of these men, some of whom had been working the military trains for years. During my time on the duty train, there was no food service car, but the porters sold snack items through the train. My favorite memory is of getting up early when I was a passenger on the Bremerhaven to Berlin train (about 4:00 a.m.), when I smelled a wonderful coffee aroma. Unlike the crowded Frankfurt - Berlin train, this train rarely carried many passengers, and on this winter trip, I was among the few on board. Who was having coffee?
I pulled myself together and went through the corridor to the end of the car, where the schaffner was heating coffee on a tiny gas hotplate. No one else was moving around... we were still inside the Soviet Zone, traveling through the dark. He pulled out an extra cup and invited me to join him, as his guest. We rode along and talked railroading. He had once worked the NATO sleeper, which ran between Paris and Bremerhaven's Port of Entry (POE) in connection with the S.S. United States. This was roughly a two-week round-trip, with the layover on the Paris end of the turn. He had plenty of time to sightsee! He also recalled sleeping in the car on his layover, piling on the blankets during cold winter nights (Paris can be cold and damp). His wife was not very pleased with his assignment, but it was a premier piece of work, and tips were good.
There have been a number of times that I was awake in the middle of the night on a train or a ship. This quiet conversation with a man who loved his work, with good coffee, was one of the best.
Conductor (Zugfuehrer): Most of the trip through East Germany, the Zugfuehrer rode in his own compartment (abteilung) in splendid isolation, with nothing to do. Our Army train conductor would deal with him on operating matters, and that was it. I would have liked to have learned much more about his work on this peculiar assignment, but I was not on the trains long enough to do so.
-- Robert W. Rynerson
Rail Transportation Office
Berlin Brigade, 1969
Read a story of the Berlin Military Trains.
Read about the Flag Orders needed for travel through the Soviet Zone.