WELLING UP
Germany’s ‘tankies’ are all pretty similar, right? Wrong. TONY STREETER seeks out the Vulcan 0-8-0WTs on the country’s biggest island.
Well tanks on Germany’s biggest island
As the last shadows stretch across autumn fields, a little engine shuffles towards home. Behind it, a mixed rag-tag rake of wagons, vans and four-wheel coaches. At the lineside there is a group of people, some of whom have travelled far to see this.
This locomotive is one of a trio of surviving well tanks from a long-defunct and largely forgotten company. Today, this particular engine is the focus of attention; tomorrow, it will run with its matching sister in a spectacle unlikely to be repeated for a long time.
In case your mind is now drifting back to a certain South Western farewell, it is not 1962 – and we are some 600 miles from Waterloo. What’s more, even Beatties Nos. 30585 and 30587 would dwarf these particular engines, because they run on 750mm-gauge lines.
Once part of Pomerania, later the German Democratic Republic, this is the island of Ruegen (Rügen). Around us is the Baltic; Poland is to the east and Sweden to the north, and these engines are 0-8-0WTs built to order for the local province and delivered from 1913. For those British gricers who struggled here on the cobbled back roads of East Germany, finding one of these well tanks was the ultimate prize. But the hunts came to an end when they were largely replaced by newer and bigger engines.
Yet this is not the 1980s either. It is 2018. The year when, for the first time in around three decades – and for only around ten months – a pair of the ‘99.463’ locomotives are in traffic, together, in their familiar black and red.
If you think that, much like the GWR, ‘all German narrow gauge engines are the same’, then consider the ‘Mh’ tank engines as the equivalent of the ‘Dean Goods’. Smaller and with more pipes on the outside – but plenty of character.
‘SWEPT BY HISTORY’
If anything symbolises Germany’s largest island today it’s the railway known by holidaymakers as ‘Racing Roland’: that, and the white chalk cliffs in the north, one of which, ‘Victoria’s View’ is named in honour of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter.
Yet this line has not always had an easy life. As recently as 2008, it carried a provisional service using hired-in stock after the local government re-let the operation which, from 1996 to 2007, had been undertaken by the company Ruegensche Kleinbahn GmbH. The new Ruegensche Baederbahn started operations by bringing engines and coaches from Saxony until issues over the use of Ruegen’s domestic stock could be settled.
From 1994 to 1996 the railway had been part of Germany’s Deutsche Bahn – and from 1949 its predecessor, the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Such changes, and others before them, are reminders that this part of the world has been repeatedly swept by history.
Less than five miles from the intermediate station at Binz lies Prora, a gargantuan former Nazi holiday camp with buildings nearly two miles long facing the sea. Today, and after years of use by East Germany’s army, Prora is part-ruin, part-museum and partly converted into a youth hostel and flats.
On the neighbouring island of Usedom is Peenemuende, famous for development of the V2 rockets and where a crashed Lancaster bomber still lies in a lake even now. Since 1945 the formerly Prussian mainland city of Stettin, where Ruegen’s well tanks were built, has been Polish; now, its name is Szczecin.
Since the 2008 reorganisation the line has been worked by the commercial ‘wing’ of a successful group that began by reopening the narrow gauge line from Joehstadt in Saxony, part of the famous Wolkenstein route so loved by photographers but which had closed in the 1980s. Considerable progress has followed in the decade of Ruegensche Baederbahn control. Engines and stock have been overhauled, recent station refurbishments have been sympathetic and additional locomotives have arrived.
Today, the line runs year-round between Goehren on the island’s south-east coast and Putbus in the south that has an interchange with the standard gauge railway – a total of around 15 miles. Since 1999 services have also run during the summer timetable, top-and-tailed with a diesel, for a little under two miles between Putbus and the little harbour at Lauterbach Mole. This section is over mixed gauge track, with narrow gauge and standard gauge services interspersed.
At its western end the line gambols through the rurality for which Ruegen was known in times past, while on the easternmost section thick woodland heralds the approach to Goehren. However, where it serves the seaside resorts of Sellin and Baabe inbetween, it’s hemmed in by an increasingly modern, built-up landscape.
The holiday homes and hotels are sources of traffic though, and in summer – when two trains are typically underway between Putbus and Goehren, with a third shuttling over the eight miles between Binz and Goehren – the last service is not home until nearly 11.30pm. That train overnights at Goehren. During the quieter, winter timetable all locomotives return to Putbus.
This was and is a tourist railway; it now carries some 600,000 people per year. Yet enthusiasts are made welcome, not least through specially targeted events such as a ‘Fan day’ held in October. It seems the Ruegensche Baederbahn is run by people who understand…
TENACIOUS ‘TANKIE’ TRIO
The first of East Germany’s standard post-war 2-10-2Ts to reach the island turned up in 1983. By then a familiar shape in the hilly south-west, its multiple domes and centipede-like wheels appear almost foreign here. So does its size, compared to the little engines it joined.
Those were Henschel 2-8-0Ts Nos. 99.4801 and 99.4802 from 1938, which came here when their original line near Magdeburg closed in 1965, plus the only steam that wasn’t second-hand, the three well tanks built by Vulcan of Stettin.
Officially, these were the ‘Mh’ class from Lenz, the company that had been the railway’s major shareholder at the start and which built and worked it during the early years. The ‘h’ meant the engines were superheated – the original saturated design being simply class ‘M’. Of the ten to be built in total, all but the trio here were sent as reparations to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
In 1984 the 71-year-old No. 99.4631 was sold into West Germany. That left the 1925-built No. 99.4633, which was out of use at Putbus shed by 1989, plus No. 99.4632 from 1914. Although this single engine carried on, it spent months out of use.
Yet if anything exudes the persona of ‘Racing Roland’, it is surely these veterans. The Deutsche Reichsbahn, which then still ran the line, decided to revive its remaining well tank pair with new boilers and cylinders, and to paint them green with their previous numbers 52Mh and 53Mh. That was in 1992, the year before the DR’s demise.
It would take until 2018, and the latest return of
No. 99.4632 from overhaul, before both were again in traffic together, and painted black – but that particular revival is already over. On October 7 the pair double-headed service trains one last time before No. 99.4633 was stopped for its own rebuild. A start date for that has yet to be confirmed, but when it returns north from Meiningen Works the well tank will once again be the green 53Mh, and with an expected ‘retro-conversion’ of cosmetic details too. Germany’s heritage authorities are understood to want at least one machine in the old livery.
Once it is back, the 0-8-0WT will join a fleet that has now grown to include four 2-10-2Ts, as well as the Vulcan engines and 2-8-0Ts, plus one further, more exotic, machine: in 2008 the former No. 7 from the Mansfelder Bergwerksbahn near the Harz mountains arrived here and has become No. 99.4011.
Might there be, at some future point, a repeat of the well tank ‘flashback’ of 2018? Could, perhaps, the exiled No. 99.4631 even return home one day? As the Germans say, ‘hope dies last’…
In the meantime, this unique, busy and successful railway will keep ‘racing’ across its island – at under 20mph.
IT SEEMS THE RUEGENSCHE BAEDERBAHN IS RUN BY PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND…