[size=1" face="Verdana" id="quote]quote:According to former Borsig engineer Karl-Heinz Golze, the sentence, "The prototype of the Märklin 3102 locomotive was never built" is incorrect. He was 61 [sic, but I suspect this should say 16] years old at the time and he continues, "At Borsig I saw with my own eyes the first assembly work for this locomotive."

To paraphrase Golze’s quotes, "while we were knocking out 52s [the first Kriegslok], there was also another locomotive under construction which looked quite different from the standard wartime locomotives. It was the Borsig I, the big articulated Lok. Evidently the design had been given the green light because no one was allowed to admit that the war at this point could not be won and the big Lok would be needed for service to the Eastern regions.

Golze describes the sight, "The cylinder mounts could be seen easily. The frame was finished. I walked on it myself." There was a little to see of the tender and the cab as there was of the cylinders but the lathe operators had already worked on the wheel sets. The boiler was also in progress. Golze cannot conceive that the locomotive was ever totally finished or even under steam. He also does not know what became of the parts under construction. "I was drafted in the summer of 1944. Much happened after that and also during the chaotic postwar period that followed. The bottom line is that he never set foot in the Borsig factory again.

[size=1" face="Verdana" id="quote]quote:Despite ever more difficult working conditions, it seems that the Hennigsdorf engineers talked about building a prototype. While there may have been such talk, there is evidence that were only preliminary sketches but no detailed drawings that would be needed to machine components.

The Borsig history for 1943 notes that the company’s facilities in Hennigsdorf near Berlin were heavily damaged by air raids and therefore continuing with locomotive construction was not possible. It was possible to finish two Kriegsloks in January 1944. Also, it was possible to carry out some locomotive repairs. One source notes that by war’s end in April 1945 only about 25 percent of the company’s machine tools were in working order.