Eisenbahn Kurier Themen

This entry in the Eisenbahn Kurier series 'Themen' is a little misleading. On first glance, it appears to be about the locomotives built for the Deutsche Reichsbahn between 1919 and 1945. The work is profusely illustrated with excellent photographs from the Carl Bellingrodt collection.

But the text is something different. It is a fairly erudite account of the politics and economics of locomotive building in Germany, with detailed statistics of locomotive production. Along the way, we get some show more interesting snippets relating to German railway history, such as the various changes to the structure of German railways in light of both the Versailles Treaty and the constitutional changes to the German state itself.

For anyone not wanting the technical exposition of railway economics, this may be worth acquiring for the photographs, if you find a copy and the price is right. show less

A detailed description of the three locomotive sheds and workshops in Dresden; Friedrichstadt, Pieschen and Altstadt, plus an examination of the post-war arrangements whereby workshop facilities for the new diesel locomotives and railcars were concentrated on one site (Pieschen).

The text goes into considerable detail, and I found myself skimming much of it. However, it does cover both the damage from the 1945 bombing raid and - more unusually - some indication of the way that reconstruction show more works were carried out and over what period. This is backed up by extensive quotations from official correspondence of the 1945-48 period, making this a very useful publication.

I have two minor criticisms. There is no overall map of Dresden, showing the location of each shed, especially in relation to the original geography of Dresden's stations. I was aware of the complexity of this from my own visits and from recent reading about Dresden's railway history, but without this background knowledge a lot of the significance of the story is missed. And some of the photographs are quite interesting for some of the incidental things they show. Why is there a French Nord coach on the rear of a train being banked out of Dresden? What is the history of the type of baggage car seen in one picture that was designed clearly to match the post-war Reichbahn's double-deck coaches? In more than twenty years of interest in German railways, I've never seen this type of vehicle before. And the push-pull train, formed of two eight-car articulated double-deck coach sets, with a diesel locomotive sandwiched in the middle and a driving trailer (at one end only) converted from a pre-war baggage car, echoes Great Western (and post-war Swiss) practice but was certainly something I'd not previously seen in German photographs. Some comment was made in the text of the Lithuanian new-build narrow-gauge railcars built specifically for the line between Freital-Potschappel and Nossen, but I would have liked to know more.

Still, a useful and detailed publication. show less