Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  When Germany emerged from the war, those 01.10s and 03.10s that had survived were stripped of their streamlined casing and, looking much like their unadorned, two-cylinder siblings, and working on identical passenger duties, could still be seen hard at work until the mid-1970s. As for the 05s, they were de-streamlined in 1950 at the Krauss Maffei works by Adolf Wolff himself. With boiler pressure reduced to 235 psi, these handsome 4-6-4s lost some of their edge and were, in any case, limited to a modest 140 kph. They did, however, work the longest regular express services on the new Deutsche Bundesbahn, the 703 kilometre route from Hamburg via Cologne and Frankfurt. But as they were not standard locomotives – the blessing or curse of Richard Wagner – the 05s were withdrawn in 1958, despite having a good many years left in them. Very sadly, 05 002 was scrapped, although her sister, 05 001, was fully restored to her original condition in 1963 – Adolf Wolff witnessed the work – and is now on display in the Nuremberg transport museum. In 2011, Mallard was shipped from her home at the Railway Museum in York to meet 05 001 at Nuremberg as part of a seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of 05 002’s world-record run.

  There had been one other successful attempt at a steam rival to the latest high-speed German diesels. This was the remarkable Henschel-Wegmann Train, produced by the Henschel works in Kassel and the local coachbuilders, Wegmann, a firm that also made tanks for the military in both world wars (and once again when production of the Leopard 1 began in 1965). The idea of a two-car, push-pull, high-speed, streamlined steam express train, which was, in essence, a steam multiple-unit, had been proposed to Wagner and the Deutsche Reichsbahn by Henschel’s manager, Karl Imfeld, in April 1933. The following February, Dr Friedrich Fuchs, the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s chief mechanical engineer, went to visit Imfeld. The answer was yes, but Fuchs insisted on a four-coach train.

  The result, unveiled in May 1935, was a streamlined, if slightly bulbous, 4-6-4 tank engine blurred into the four coaches, including an observation car, fitted with roller bearings and disc brakes, trailing behind it. First shown to the public during the centenary celebrations held for the German railways between July and October 1935 – Hitler was one of the many visitors – the train began service on a very tight 65 mph schedule over the 176 kilometres between Berlin and Dresden the following summer. The 1 hour and 40 minute timing cut 28 minutes from the fastest existing schedule; in 2012, the fastest train between the two cities took 2 hours and 4 minutes.

  Even more impressive was the fact that the train made two return journeys each day. The solitary two-cylinder class 61 4-6-4T was well up to the job. Beneath its voluminous dress, it was a well-proportioned, free-steaming locomotive, with a boiler pressure of 294 psi, which ran at 160 kph (99.5 mph) in everyday service and up to 175 kph (109 mph) when required; on test, 61 001 reached 185 kph, or approximately 115 mph, a world record for a tank engine. This was no Thomas. When the locomotive returned to Henschel for a major overhaul, it was replaced by 01 and 03 Pacifics. Although the streamlined Dresden service ceased to run in August 1939 as Germany prepared for war, 61 001 was returned to traffic in 1948, based at Bebra, close to Kassel. Badly damaged in an accident at Munster in November 1951, she was taken out of service and scrapped six years later.

  A second and sleeker class 61 joined 61 001 in 1939. With three-cylinders and a bigger water tank and coal bunker, 61 002 only just made it into passenger service in the summer of 1939. Fate, however, was kinder to 61 002. In 1961, she was converted at Meiningen works by the Deutsches Reichsbahn into a semi-streamlined, three-cylinder tender locomotive, with larger cylinders and a combustion-chamber boiler, while retaining her 2.3 m (7 ft 6½ in) driving wheels (the largest fitted to a Pacific), designed to test new coaching stock at high speeds. Fitted with a highly efficient Giesl ejector exhaust, 18 201, as she was now numbered, was rated at 2,120 ihp, with a maximum speed of 180 kph. On test in 1972, this elegant green engine steamed up to 182.4 kph, or about 113 mph, making her the fastest post-war steam locomotive on record, beating the record set by A4 60007 Sir Nigel Gresley in 1959 by just 1 mph. Since 1980, 18 201 has worked special trains and in 2012, owned by Dampf-Plus, she is still very much in action and, on occasion, runs at very high speed.

  High-speed trains were glamorous, much feted, and greatly admired. But, as trains grew heavier throughout the 1930s, what operating departments required most of all was power: reliable, consistent, readily available power. So, the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s final streamliners were a pair of mighty three-cylinder 4-8-4s, the 06 class, crafted by Krupp in 1939. No other 4-8-4s were built in Germany. The locomotives were 26.5 m (87 feet) long and weighed 142 tons (a Stanier LMS Coronation was 70 feet long and weighed 105 tons). Rated at 2,761 ihp, they were designed to pull 650 ton trains on the level at 120 kph (74.5 mph), with a maximum of 140 kph (87 mph). Hugely impressive to look at, the 06s, with their long wheelbase, tended to derail on sharp curves. The boilers, meanwhile, developed cracks. Doubtless, Krupp and Wagner would have improved the engines if more had been built, but by summer 1939 sheer power was needed, mostly to pull freight trains. The fleet of Pacifics that Wagner and the German manufacturers had built up since 1925 was perfectly adequate to the tasks asked of them by railway management. The 06s survived the war, but were scrapped by the Deutsche Bundesbahn in 1951.

  The 06s used the same boiler as the class 45 2-10-2s which, by rights, should have been the mainstay of Deutsche Reichsbahn heavy freight operations from their inception in 1936 and for the next forty years. And yet, just twenty-eight of these impressive-looking, three-cylinder machines were built, an order for 103 being cancelled in 1941. Faster than previous Deutsche Reichsbahn freight locomotives – 90 kph (56 mph) as opposed to 80 kph (50 mph) – and far more powerful, the 45s promised a great deal, but, like the 06s, they suffered from boiler problems, and there was no time, or will, after the invasion of Poland in September 1939 to develop them further. When equipped with new combustion-chamber boilers and mechanical stokers from 1950, the 45s finally showed what they could do. Only five were rebuilt, however, and in 1968 the last three members of the class were made redundant.

  As German troops swept across Poland and Hitler began to prepare for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Deutsche Reichsbahn was extended ever further east, while more troop trains, trains ferrying tanks and artillery pieces, trains fetching fuel, and trains supplying factories across the newly conquered territories pushed what was a well-run railway to unprecedented limits. With new lines laid quickly, the cry from operators in the east was for simple, strong engines with light axle loads. Fitness for purpose and simplicity truly were the keys to good wartime design. Even Wagner’s powerful and dependable class 44 2-10-0s were too heavy in axle loading and too complex for the rigours of wartime assignments.

  Wagner responded with the class 50 2-10-0s, first built in 1939, rugged, two-cylinder machines with an axle loading of just 15.2 tons (anything under 18 tons is light). Weighing 87 tons and allowed to run at 80 kph (50 mph) in both directions, the class 50s were as popular as they were reliable. They were designated Kriegsloks and were among some seven thousand steam locomotives produced in Germany during just two and a half years of brutal conflict. Even so, the first class 50s were considered too complex for the kind of mass production that men like Wagner could never have envisaged in the 1920s. The revised class 50UK (Übergangskriegslokomotive, or transitional war locomotive), with fabricated welded construction replacing steel castings, was the result – yet even this was seen as too complex for the rapid production the government and military demanded. Cue the class 52, an austerity version of the class 50 and the archetypal Kriegslok, a steam locomotive prepared for all-out war as never before.

  The class 50, however, continued to be built, with gaps, not just throughout the Second World War, but for a long time afterwards. The final members of the class were built, with modifications to the original design, by the East German Deutsche Reichsbahn at the Lokomotivbau Karl Marx in Babelsberg in 1960, by which t
ime 3,164 had been produced. Class 50s continued in front-line service on the Deutsche Bundesbahn until the end of steam in 1977, and on the Deutsche Reichsbahn until 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  These engines were great travellers. Either seized by allied railway engineers or made over as war reparations, the class 50s could be found at work between the 1950s and 1970s in, among other countries, Austria, Poland, Denmark, France, Turkey, the USSR, and Norway, as well as throughout the Balkans. They may have been used for evil ends in the early and mid-1940s, but the steam locomotive is in itself an innocent machine, and the class 50 was much needed and much liked wherever it went.

  The class 52 began service just as German expansion eastwards was grinding to a halt. In this sense, they were too late; yet few can doubt that, whatever the job they were asked to do, the locomotives themselves performed reliably and well. Brutes to look at, the class 52s were among the quickest of all steam locomotives to build. Records of exactly how many man-hours were needed to build a complete 52 are uncertain, but the production figures speak for themselves. Between September 1942 and May 1945, more than 6,300 had been put into service. More were built between 1945 and 1950, bringing the total up to what seems to have been 6,719. From 1960, the Deutsche Reichsbahn rebuilt 200 with new boilers, and a total of 290 with Giesl ejector draughting to enable low-grade coal to be burned efficiently.

  After the war, the class 52s were dispersed throughout various parts of Europe, although it was somehow strange to see some of the very last of them working for the Polish railways. It was the invasion of Poland that had signalled the start of the Second World War and it was in Poland that the worst of the Nazi extermination camps were sited – and it was the 52s that had brought so many to their deaths there. But as an example of how a machine that was essentially the product of a long craft tradition could be transformed into a unit of mass production, the 52 remains a fascinating locomotive.

  A heavier Kriegslok, the two-cylinder class 42, was built in much smaller numbers – 837 in 1943 and 1944, with further examples produced between 1945 and 1949 – to be used where limitations on axle loads were less demanding than on the eastern front. There was, however, a design for a much larger Kriegslok altogether. This was Adolf Wolff’s 1943 proposal for a 2-6-8-0 compound Mallet, a form of articulated locomotive with two engine units beneath the boiler, devised by the Swiss engineer Anatole Mallet. At 27.4 m (90 feet) long and weighing 140 tons, this impressive locomotive would have been a formidable performer, but by the time Wolff was drawing up outline designs the Borsig works had been severely damaged by allied air raids, and as 1944 dawned it was clear to most steam men – if not to Adolf Hitler – that the war was lost and that, as Germany fought an increasingly desperate rearguard action on two fronts, the production of weapons and ammunition would have to take over from that of locomotives.

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  Production of steam locomotives recommenced in 1950, by which time Germany was divided. In both halves of the country, however, it was essential to get the railways running as efficiently as possible once again. The need for new steam production seemed clear enough at the time. Steam locomotives were cheap, the know-how was there, and coal was plentiful. In those first few years, though, examples of Wagner’s and Wolff’s superb streamliners could be seen wheezing along in filthy condition with great chunks of their cladding missing – it could have been Britain in the 1960s. And yet, such had been the rate of production of wartime 2-10-0s, there was a surplus of heavy freight locomotives in 1945. Then it was found that there were sufficient Wagner Pacifics to maintain a decent main-line passenger service. So, initially under Friedrich Witte, new steam locomotives returned in the guise of mixed-traffic tender and tank engines, efficient, reliable, and modern, but far from fast or powerful.

  The only new type of locomotives built in any number in West Germany before the decision to abandon steam production were the class 23 2-6-2s, of which 105 were built between 1950 and 1959. Completed by Arnold Jung Locomotivfabrik of Kirchen in December 1959, 23 105 was the last steam locomotive built for the Deutsche Bundesbahn. Much of the engine – boiler, frames, tender – was welded, while the locomotive was mechanically lubricated and very easy to maintain. It was neither very fast – its top speed was limited to 110 kph (68 mph) – nor especially powerful. The class 23 was, though, a quiet culmination of the work that Wagner had started in 1923 with his standardization programme. Things might have stood there, had not a glamorous new express passenger locomotive emerged in 1957 from Krupp, as if it were the 1930s all over again – but without the Nazis.

  Known as the Schwarze Schwäne, the Black Swans, 10 001 and 10 002 were fated to be the only two members of a class – the oil-fired class 10 – intended to replace the veteran, if still decidedly game, 01 and 01.10 Wagner Pacifics. These striking, semi-streamlined, three-cylinder machines, with 265 psi boiler pressure and double blast-pipe and chimney, were an intriguing mix of the latest German, French, and American practices, complete with haunting chime whistle. They were well engineered and easy to maintain, and they went on to perform very reliably indeed, clocking up 150,000 miles between major servicing (even the latest British Pacifics struggled to get to 100,000 miles). But the Black Swans had arrived too late in the day. They had short working lives – ten and eleven years – although 10 001 can be seen at the German steam locomotive museum in Neuenmarkt-Wirsberg, in Bavaria, housed in a retired engine shed. It seems a shame that one cannot see this exquisite machine in steam.

  In East Germany, steam locomotive construction on the Deutsche Reichsbahn began in 1954, later than on the Deutsche Bundesbahn. Here, great efforts were made to improve existing types rather than to build new ones. Max Baumberg was the key figure in the development of several classes of pre-war Deutsche Reichsbahn locomotives, including the 01 Pacifics.

  To visit East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s was an extraordinary experience. Once through Checkpoint Charlie, it was as if the clock had been turned back. Shell-damaged buildings – among them many of the city’s great Neo-Classical masterpieces – appeared seemingly unchanged since Marshal Zhukov’s Red Army troops hammered their way into Berlin in the spring of 1945. Blackened columns, capitals, and balustrades were still riddled with holes made by machine guns, pock-marked by artillery fire. There was little of the consumer economy that was glistening and winking on the western side of the Wall. And yet, for the transport enthusiast, the eastern half of the city was an Aladdin’s Cave: veteran trams, vintage U-Bahn trains, and, best and most unforgettable of all, the truly magnificent sight of Baumberg’s distinguished and haughty 01.5 Pacifics drawing in from Dresden.

  They were impressive in terms of both performance and looks. With new combustion-chamber boilers, stylish, clipped, Witte-style smoke deflectors, and a skyline dome cover running from chimney to cab, the 01.5s had a gloriously purposeful appearance. They were, essentially, new locomotives, thirty-five of them rebuilt from donor 01s at Meiningen works between 1962 and 1965. They were rated at 2,500 ihp, with a speed limit of either 130 or 150 kph (81 or 94 mph); they were fitted with more powerful brakes than the original 01s, and their new cabs were more comfortable to work in. In 2012, two preserved 01.5s – 01.509 (1963) and 01.533 (1964) – were operational. The east of Berlin has changed greatly since the fall of the Wall in 1989 and German unification two years later, and yet, if you scan the timetables of special trains carefully, you will still be able to steam out of the city behind one of a number of preserved German Pacifics.

  There were economic reasons to stay with steam in the German Democratic Republic, even after the announcement, made in 1956, ordering an end to steam development in the Soviet Union. While East Germany was a Soviet satellite state, its railways managed to plough their own course. The country remained one of the great steam centres into the 1980s, not least because of the intelligent work of Max Baumberg and his colleague Hans Schultz.

  Baumberg was born in Arnstadt, in Thuringia, in June 1906. He studi
ed mechanical engineering in Munich before working at Meiningen, where he learned to drive steam locomotives as well as to get to grips with their mechanics. Still very much in action today, the Dampflokwerk Meiningen (Meiningen Steam Locomotive Works) was built in its present form by the Prussian State Railways in 1914 as a repair and maintenance centre for all Prussian locomotive types. It continued in this role under the new Deutsche Reichsbahn, and even during its occupation by the US military, which captured the works in April 1945. Now owned by Deutsche Bahn AG, Meiningen remains a ‘holy city’ for steam owners, operators, and enthusiasts worldwide. With a staff down from 2,200 in its heyday to 120 in 2012, Dampflokwerk Meiningen is able to repair and overhaul steam locomotives shipped here from around the world, and to build new components and even entire new engines. This is where, in 1961, Baumberg converted the streamlined class 61 tank engine into the high-speed Pacific 18 201, and where the locomotive was completely restored for main-line service in 2002. Here the 01 class Pacific 01 1102 was re-streamlined between 1994 and 1996 and brought back to steam. In 2006, the works completed a boiler for the brand new A1 Pacific 60163 Tornado (see Chapter 7), and in 2009 it delivered a brand-new narrow-gauge 2-8-2T locomotive, 99 234.4, to the narrow-gauge Molli railway which runs between Bad Doberan and Kühlungsborn on the Baltic coast. The Molli remains a joy. Trains leave the terminus at Bad Doberan and then run right through the town’s high street before heading up to the coast, where they sprint beside the sandy beaches to Kühlungsborn, stopping at Heiligendamm, the newly restored Neo-Classical spa town founded by Friedrich Franz I, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, in 1793.

  Baumberg moved on to the works at Glückstadt, in Schleswig-Holstein, where locomotives running on the ‘Marsh Railway’ were serviced. This was the line that saw some of the very last regular express passenger steam trains in Europe; a journey from Hamburg to Westerland on Sylt island, reached across a spectacular bridge spanning the Rhine Canal, was one of the great railway trips of the early 1970s. The Wagner Pacifics were often well polished and ran the 277 kilometre trip from Hamburg across misty flatlands at consistent speed. For mile after mile, the crisp beat – slightly jazzy in the case of the three-cylinder engines – of Wagner’s locomotives was accompanied, in winter, by plumes of white steam trailing across marshland and sea. In the years after regular steam had gone on so many of the world’s railways, anyone with steam in their soul, seated by a window in the warm compartment of a deep-green carriage, would discover that the Marsh Railway was a veritable heaven.