Steam locomotive saved from eastern Ukraine by enthusiasts
BRAVE Ukrainian steam enthusiasts have spirited away a heritage narrow gauge locomotive from a city in the east of the country – believed to be among the next to be targeted by Russian armed forces.
The tiny 80-year-old 2ft 7in gauge 0-4-0T No.100.13 was moved on April 14 from Dnipro to relative safety 500 miles west in Ternopol. Dnipro is Ukraine’s fourth biggest city, with a million inhabitants, and lies about 150 miles north-west of Mariupol and less than 50 miles from the nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia which is under threat from Russia.
It is a case of history repeating itself, for No.100.13 was built for the Nazis in the Second World War, seized as reparations by the USSR after Germany surrendered, and is ironically now fleeing a war zone again.
No. 100.13 began its adventurous life in Croatia in 1942, in the wagon works in Brod, works number 9324, where it was built on behalf of the Vienna Locomotive Works in Austria, which was busy with its own wartime contracts.
Weighing less than 12 tons, its wheels are little more than 2ft in diameter. By British standards it is not the most attractive, but it is definitely a steam engine! Hitler needed steel, and the famous steelworks of Donauwitz in Styria, Austria, was far from Britishbased bombers, more than twice as far as the Ruhr. It was close to enormous supplies of highgrade iron ore and therefore in 1941-42 was greatly expanded to supply the German war machine.
Wartime acquisition
This expansion led not only to the acquisition of No. 100.13 to serve the furnaces, but also for the Deutsche Reichsbahn to order the two extraordinary 2-12-2 rack locomotives of the 97.4 class – needed to bring the iron ore from Eisenerz by railway.
One of these locomotives, now with its Austrian number 297.401, is preserved at Vordernberg Markt in Styria.
At the end of the war the Soviets invaded Austria and took whatever they could back to the USSR, including whole factories. In 1946 No.100.13 was taken more than 1000 miles east to the Soviet Union and put into service at another steelworks, this time at Dnipropetrovsk, which we now know as Dnipro.
The engine worked for 30 years serving an open-hearth steel furnace, on a 790mm gauge line of only about 250m, retiring in 1976 to a plinth in a socialist children’s camp, from which it was moved back to the steelworks in 2004 as a monument.
Now, like so many other Ukrainians, it has moved west, hoping not only to avoid the war but for a better life.
It now belongs to a little 750mm heritage railway museum at Korostiv, about 75 miles south-west of Lviv, not far from the Polish and Slovakian borders, so well away from the Russians – at least for the moment.
After regauging in Terespol, it will be taken to Korostiv for assessment, and hopefully in due course will become this heritage line’s working steam engine.
Certainly all of us at The Flour Mill would like to help. I had the good fortune to visit both Simferopol in the Crimea, if only the airport, and then Odessa, for two days back in 1967.
Although I have never returned, when the Russian invasion began I contacted Stephen Wiggs, of the New Europe Railway Heritage Trust, to ask if there was any way we could help their heritage railway people.
He put me in touch with Austrian enthusiast Wolfram Wendelin, who gave me details of an account set up by the Ukrainian Central Bank to donate money directly to their armed forces, to which I was happy to contribute. A week later, he sent pictures of this remarkable survivor, first of it escaping Dnipro and then of the motion being taken off so the wheelsets could be removed.
Both Wolfram, and Dimitry Barbarika, of the Korostiv Railway Museum, assure me that it is safe to visit, and Stephen says that the Carpathian mountain scenery is superb!