Hitler's kriegslok

Something I didn't know about. Hitler produced massive numbers of these locos.
http://www.militarymodelling.com/news/a ... tive/3326/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgEH5R7FCfU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I have a reprint of a 1945 manual for a British war department locomotive, 2-10-0 Austerity Engine and Tender - brief description with hints on maintenance and repair, which was built I think in smaller numbers than the German kriegslok.

An interesting and rare piece of history - an "owner's manual" for a steam engine. Very few (if any?) other British steam locos came with such a manual - it was apparently assumed that the railway company which designed and/or built them would know how to run and maintain them. A War Department "Austerity" engine would be used by all sorts of different countries, railway companies and the military, so presumably that's why it has a manual - the poor squaddies would have been lost without orders to follow! Britain also produced other "austerity" locos, including an 0-6-0 saddle tank. I've fired one of those in UK.

I suppose the Germans built so many kriegsloks because they didn't expect them last long. Our jugs hit anything that moved during daylight hours later in the war, and locos were prime targets.
I can visualize a driver running one of those British war locomotives, one hand on the throttle, the other on the instruction manual.
Aren't all steam locomotives more or less the same from a driver's standpoint?
"Squaddie" - I googled it, it's there. I'm picking up this strange language, English. Maori is easier to understand though.

Perhaps also because the territory the Germans controlled at their peak was vast. The railways were an essential means of communication and supply and a lot of locos would be needed. I'm thinking of the years before the USA effectively entered the war, particularly the second half of 1941 and into 1942, when they controlled large swathes of the Soviet Union as well as most of western Europe.

Steam engine controls are pretty easy to figure out and i expect a driver could step onto any footplate and make the beast move. A good fitter could probably keep any steam engine running somehow or other. However driving a particular design of loco optimally, and servicing it and maintaining it properly, would require some specifications.

Squaddie - a slang term for a British soldier.

The reason for building them in such massive numbers was that the war effort in the East required engines for the military supply trains. Most of the engines built were built specifically to pull standard loads (1200t or 1650t cargo trains) at specific speeds while not exceeding other parameters.

What one has to keep in mind in this regard is that by 1938, 95% of the rolling stock was built before WW1, and consisted of dozens to hundreds of small series previously owned by the train operating agencies of the German states. There was an effort to renew these with unitary models in the 1920s and 30s, but these only produced some 1500 engines over a space of 15 years due to a general lack of money. Even more so, at the end of the 30s, they found that these were built for the 20t axle load limits of German cargo routes, while most railway lines east of Germany only permitted 18t axle load limits.

Hence why procurement during the war was threefold:
- there was on one side an effort to continue to renew the ages-old rolling stock and replace some war losses for at-home usage - that amounted to maybe 1500-2000 out of the 14000 total engines built during the war, including 400 electric locomotives (E44/E94) of which some were used in West and East Germany until around 1990.
- on the other hand there was the above military supply situation, for which about 7,000 BR52 were built.
- and the third side was the mere fact that any locomotive built during the war was a "Kriegslokomotive" by law. All those (often narrow gauge) engines used in mines, in factories, in ports and the like, in an industry vastly expanding during the war? Those were the remaining 5,000 "Kriegslokomotiven". 1500 alone of these for example were the Köf II small shunting diesel locomotives used extensively up until the 1990s, and which still remain in private hands for shunting operations e.g. at factories.

About 80% of the BR52 locomotives built survived the war btw, most ending up in the Soviet Union, Poland, East and West Germany. In most countries they were retired after 1960 at the latest, in some they then became part of specific wartime reserve stocks (e.g. BR52 that were not regauged and still in 1435mm became a strategic reserve for Soviet Forces in Kaliningrad up to the 90s).

Isn't it gratifying getting this historical information.

Thanks, kato. Very interesting.

kato wrote:any locomotive built during the war was a "Kriegslokomotive" by law

Interesting choice of label. Generally in Britain the locos designed and built for wartime purposes were referred to as "Austerity" locos. They were often more basic than normal locos due to the shortage of materials and construction capacity, the need for easy maintenance, and the expectation that the driving and maintenance might not be carried out to the high standards of peace time.

The rhethoric of adding war to the the name was standard for the time in Germany. You just added "Krieg-" to the name to focus the population on the war effort.

In Germany the government mandated that Deutsche Reichsbahn, other government agencies and private companies after the war were only allowed to select their buys from a limited, approved list of models. Some of the models on the list were only planned, but not actually bought (e.g. KDL 2, which was intended to supplant identical confiscated engines on routes in Bohemia); many models were merely selected from what was already available in larger numbers, hence easing production and maintenance to a limited set over time, often with some wartime "reductions" due to shortage in materials. Outside of the list, locomotive operators of any kind could not buy locomotives between 1939 and 1945.

The list included 5 general standard-gauge models (steam: BR52, BMB534.0, BR42 as KDL 1-3; electric E44, E94 as KEL 1-2), 4 military locomotives for depot work (2 diesel, 2 steam), 2 standard-gauge shunting/work locomotives, 2 fireless steam locomotives and 19 industrial locomotive models, 14 of those in narrow gauge.

Usually it narrowed down to only two models for a specific environment, from which you could then select between either a lower or a higher power level for the application.

Thank you for illuminating procedures in wartime Germany.

I've only just received my December 2014 copy of The Railway Magazine from UK (post can be a bit slow here sometimes!), and there's an article on the last surviving commercial steam in Europe, at four separate industrial sites around Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Apparently a number of former Class 52 2-10-0 Kriegsloks can still be seen working on a daily basis.

Here's Google tour adds on that Bosnia; scenic countryside, and not so scenic coaling facilities.
http://www.farrail.net/pages/touren-eng ... -2007.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.farrail.net/pages/touren-eng ... m-2011.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Here are two similar photos: one from South Africa, by Kevin Wilson-Smith, on Friends of the Rail; and the lower one from Bosnia.

I was cleaning fire on that very same ashpit just last week - the South African one, not the Bosnian one, that is. And I was chatting to the photographer, Kevin Wilson-Smith, by phone just yesterday evening.

johnthefireman wrote:I was cleaning fire on that very same ashpit just last week - the South African one, not the Bosnian one, that is. And I was chatting to the photographer, Kevin Wilson-Smith, by phone just yesterday evening.

Yes, and it's a good photo.

Here are a couple more shots of type 52s, I guess; (type 33s in Bosnia.) Part of what I like about the night photo is the little tower in the background. I worked in ones like it, fifty years ago.