Over the years, I’ve been to a good number of railroad museums; we railfans tend to seek them out. They all share a lot—shiny restored trains, historic exhibits, admiring fans—but each one also has a story of its own to tell.
Sometimes it’s the story of a single company, like the B&O Museum in Baltimore, or the pioneer railroads in a particular region, or even a local transit system. But a theme runs through all of them: How a particular need led to developing the railroads, and how the railroads affected the world around them.
The original Princes’ Portal of the Anhalter Bahnhof, once set aside for royalty now stands at the entrance of the railroad exhibits
The railroad and train exhibits at Berlin’s German Technical Museum tells that story, too. There’s plenty of historical memorabilia to make a fan’s heart flutter, but it also showed off parallels to the development of the railroads in the United States, starting with fairly short and localized lines linking nearby cities to each other, and natural resources to factories.
And, as in the U.S. in the middle of the 19th century, there was keen competition among some of them. But there are differences, too: Before 1870, Germany was an assortment of kingdoms, duchies, principalities and more, with no central government. Some of those states, such as Prussia, Baden and Bavaria created fairly dense webs of rails early, others did so only later.
On display: the personal rail car of the German Kaisers
But after 1870, when all of the German states were united in one state, that changed; the new rulers recognized the importance of connecting all the pieces into a nationwide system that could efficiently move passengers, coal, ore, food, soldiers throughout the country. The creation of the Imperial Railroad, the Reichsbahn, was seen as an important step, one that was later written into the Weimar Constitution.
That’s similar, in a way, to the role railroads played in the United States, changing the country from a string of states anchored to the Atlantic and another anchored to the Mississippi River into a more integrated market. And, similarly to the creation of the Reichsbahn, the U.S. government promoted and funded the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, to bring the Pacific Coast into full connection with the rest.
The Technical Museum’s railroad exhibits are mainly located in two roundhouse buildings just behind the museum’s main building. They were part of the huge freight yards south of the Landwehr Canal that connected with the Anhalter Bahnhof north of the canal and one of Berlin’s main stations before its destruction in World War II. The title image shows a model of the station.
The roundhouses could accommodate scores of locomotives, providing them with maintenance, repair and a place to turn around and head out for another run. Above, Germany went for streamlining in the 1930s, as did railroads in most countries. Eventually, the streamline panels were removed because they made maintenance difficult and didn’t have much effect on speed.
A Nazi-era electric locomotive, fitted out with swastika emblems
The 1930s and 1940s also saw the Reichsbahn put to another use, which the museum documents: transporting prisoners to Nazi concentration and death camps. There’s also acknowledgement of railway workers who resisted.
After the war, another aspect of German rail history: Trümmerbahnen. Many of Germany’s cities had whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble by aerial bombing and artillery attacks.
The vast volume of rubble was cleared away by these temporary narrow-gauge railroads laid in the streets.
Many of those loading the trains were women, and the women who drove some of the trains were the first women to do so in Germany.
There’s also a good selection of railcars and locomotives from the post-war era, when (at least in West Germany) the Reichsbahn became the Bundesbahn. A few are the actual cars, and some are there in model form.
In the second model image below, one of the cars is a U.S. Army passenger car, used on the carefully-regulated run through East Germany to Berlin for military personnel; all other trains were subject to Soviet or East German security. No Soviet or East German officials were allowed to enter the train; the train commander and his military police detachment got off at checkpoints and showed all the passenger documents before continuing. I made my first trip to Berlin that way in April, 1961, shortly before the wall went up.
The museum also has a detailed large-scale model of the Anhalter Bahnhof and its surroundings, as it would have appeared in the late 1920s. A Berlin S-Bahn car from that era is also on display.
Outside the roundhouse buildings, there’s a stretch of track marked by items of vastly different eras. One is a water-filling station for steam engines; the other is a prototype of the Flirt Akku, the first commercial battery-operated train, now going into service on a number of regional lines in Germany. The batteries charge as the train runs on overhead power, but then continues on battery in remote areas, saving the expense of electrifying former diesel lines.
The rail exhibit is included in admission to the whole German Technical Museum, with its general exhibits and its automotive section. Nearly all the explanatory signs are in English as well as German, although in some cases with less detail.
Last note: This sculpture is in the outdoor exhibit area of the rail section, but I have lost my note of what it represents. If anyone knows, or cares to make a ‘caption contest’ of it…
