GERMANY: MEININGEN WORKS
Building boilers in the 21st century
Atraverser grinds along the shop floor. To each side, light glances among riveted steel columns onto dismembered torsos. A mechanical dystopia? No. A rare survivor.
Sometimes those torsos are many, at other times few. This is the erecting shop of Meiningen Works – and the jigsaws of parts neatly scattered within its walls might be for ‘Pacifics’, but also for narrow gauge tank engines, or even wagons and cranes.
As the traverser heads for the open air, it rolls past machine and wheel shops – and behind them, the boiler shop. It is there that the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust is having two new boilers built – to add to the one already delivered in 2006 (SR494).
“When people ask me ‘why Meiningen?’ I say ‘because there are 120 people, working on steam!’,” says the trust’s David Elliott.
Graeme Bunker adds: “They have a significant design and assurance capability that is unique. The combination of these two elements offers their customers significant reassurance, whether
undertaking overhauls of components or major investments in new frames, new boilers or potentially a whole locomotive.” That is not hyperbole. In 2009 the works turned out new 2-8-2T No. 99.2324 for the 900m-gauge railway at Bad Doberan on the Baltic coast. The same year it also completed a replica 750mm-gauge ‘I K’ 0-6-0T, No. 54.
Most of Germany’s best-known ‘runners’ have been through here in recent years: ‘Pacifics’ up to No. 18.201 (the world’s fastest working steam engine until the end of its ticket last year), ‘Kriegsloks’ and Harz 2-10-2Ts… After replica 1835 Stephenson 2-2-2 Adler was caught in the devastating fire at Nuremberg in 2005, it came here to be painstakingly reconstructed. Overseas jobs speckle the order books too – and not only from the A1 Trust.
ROYAL CONNECTION
Nor is Tornado’s boiler even the earliest British connection to this central German town: the first Royal to travel by train
PEOPLE ASK ME ‘WHY MEININGEN?’ I SAY ‘BECAUSE THERE ARE 120 PEOPLE WORKING ON STEAM!’
DAVID ELLIOTT, A1 STEAM LOCOMOTIVE TRUST
was born in Meiningen in 1792. Except that here Adelaide was known not by the name familiar to us, but as Princess Adelheid of Sachsen-Meiningen.
The future queen had left nearly 40 years before and been dead nearly a decade by the time the railway here opened in 1858. Today’s works is much newer, being finished for the Prussian State Railways in 1914 as a replacement for earlier workshops. Another decade on, absorption into the Deutsche Reichsbahn brought a tongue-twisting new designation: Reich sb ah na us be s se rungsw erk. Given the length of that compound word, it may be no surprise that the abbreviated ‘RAW’ became common parlance – and still is, even though this place has now officially been Dampflokwerk Meiningen for more than 20 years.
Still part of Germany’s state-owned railway, Deutsche Bahn, Meiningen is the company’s central – and only – steam workshop. It is much smaller than before – a result of unification and the rundown of steam on East Germany’s Deutsche Reichsbahn – to which the abandoned buildings at the rear of the site bear testament. Even so, some 100-plus people work here and many of eastern Germany’s surviving narrow gauge lines still depend on its skills.
Where now? The trio of Saxon lines run by the SDG at Cranzahl, Freital and Radebeul already have their own workshops, and the same is planned for the Harz metre gauge system. Others look likely to stick with the Thuringian works.
Winter is generally the best time to visit for one of the organised tours – for that is when tourist lines tend to send their engines so they can be ready for the summer season. Even bigger though is the annual open weekend, when overhauled engines return, special trains run, and stands fill corners in the workshops. Last year’s event brought more than 10,000 visitors.
For 2019 the open weekend is on September 7/8 – too early yet to see another finished ‘A1’ boiler – and also too soon to walk inside a visitor centre planned to fill some of the disused space in future. Yet the real attraction here is surely the works itself… now a rare beast indeed, and another of Germany’s remarkable survivors.
Open weekend details: www.dampflokwerk.de/en/dampfloktage