Hi,
66 years ago today, 6th September, was the first time the wording Deutsche Bundesbahn was ever officially used. Please read the text to find out more.
In this article I wish to trace the manner in which ownership of a typical German goods wagon was clearly marked for administrative and logistical reasons.

A friend of mine has been a modeller since the late 1940s, and his father worked in the Queensland Railways as manager of a wagon and carriage painting shop. He has got some stories to tell – like the methods for applying gold-leaf lettering to Tuscan red passenger cars, and the myriad of stencils and rules to ensure the systematic recognition and utilisation of wagons in a fleet.
Anyway, on my Marklin layout I have quite a collection of German open wagons and coal cars, so I can run a realistically long train for early to mid era III. I discovered a few things about the typical gondola type (rectangular box) German coal and open cars.
All gondola wagons were given the classification O (for offener) by the DRG. If you look closely, some have ends which pivot from the top or bottom, so the car can be tipped and emptied on end. Some have drop-down sides. All appear to have side doors, so material can be shovelled out by hand. I have not noticed any with drop doors in the floor, which was a typically British and US utility.
Here is an example from Marklin, of the well-known 4696 in one of its iterations. (Acknowledgment for the photo to www.wentinkoccasions.nl).



Most open cars operating in the 1950s, were products of design from the early 1900s. From that time the provincial German railroads agreed to standard designs, called Verbandsbauart. Wikipedia says of one of these standard types, which were given an engineering design Class nomenclature, “The Class A10 was an open wagon, newly designed in 1909 and built from 1913 to 1928. Over 200,000 of these trucks were built, the largest production run of a class of goods wagon in the world. Also described as an "open coke wagon", it was intended for the transportation of almost all not-hygroscopic goods, especially bulk goods such as coal, sand or agricultural produce.”
These wagons were named in the series Essen or Breslau in DRG times, and also carried the category Om (m = load 15 tonnes) into DB times.
The lettering of all open wagons is quite interesting, and I have included some photos to illustrate, using various examples. One of these is the Halle wagon series in Class A1 of the Verbandsbauart. Over the span of their useful lives, these wagons were used as you can imagine, for anything from machinery or apples, to gravel and waste. Goods wagons were marked by the district railway paint shop with the name of their owner, "Deutsche Reichsbahn", the series designation (in this case Halle), the road or running number, and a category (in this case O).
The photo is of Fleischmann model #5204.



You may have noticed so far, that the font of the lettering is uniform, but the styles, form and positions of the lettering is not. This lack of uniformity shows itself in more photos as we progress.
 
In 1942, the "Deutsche Reichsbahn" lettering began to be replaced by the simple “DR”, so the ownership lettering may have looked like this photo below. The wagon here is of the Breslau series of Class A10 mentioned above, so the designation Breslau, and category O are retained. The model is from Marklin set 47891, but the lettering has been modified by photo editing. (I have seen models with the DR abbreviation, on a version of Fleischmann tinplate open wagon 1205 (early 1950), Marklin closed van 4877, on more modern Brawa #48826, Piko 54113, and Roco 46238 Kuhlwagen). In about 1942-43, the designation came to be abbreviated as well. Without any evidence for confirmation, we might say that Breslau becomes Bre, or Essen becomes Ess, or Halle becomes Ha.



From mid-1945, the districts of the DRG were managed in conjunction with interim governments. The markings on wagons continued to be applied using the previous rules or instructions. Early in 1948, the DRG began to add a zonal lettering, to distinguish the area in which the car was normally used. An example is “Zone Fr.” for cars used in the French occupied area, but in this photo the example is for the Russian zone, again from Marklin set 47891.



Thomas Landwehr, a documentation expert employed by Marklin at Goppingen, had this to say in 2007 in the Marklin Insider magazine, regarding the following period of railway operation. “The name ‘Deutsche Reichsbahn’ was altered quite without ceremony. In a railroad service telex dated Sept. 6, 1949, the Administrative Director for Traffic notified the Deutsche Reichsbahn headquarters in the British and American zones of occupation, as follows: “Effective Sept 7 1949, the designation ‘Deutsche Reichsbahn’ within the Combined Economic Zone will be changed to ‘Deutsche Bundesbahn’”. This was not an act of foundation; it was simply done to keep the name of the German railroad compatible with the name of the Republic set up in May 1949.”
Think of the bureaucratic formalities, allowing this information to filter down to the district railway paint shops. Again, Thomas says “.....starting in June 1951, it has become necessary to renumber the whole of the freight car fleet of the DB….”. So when a wagon came into a shop for repainting, the lettering and numbering was considered for renewal at the same time.
Any confusion is understandable. Here is a model where the ownership lettering is changed simply from Deutsche Reichsbahn to Deutsche Bundesbahn in full. Note that the series designation (Halle) remains, and the running number is unchanged, as is the O for the wagon category. Compare this with the Halle 7411 (second photo of this article). You can see the progression, if the wagon had never been repainted to DR after 1942, and before any renumbering took place. This photo is of Fleischmann model #5203.



Thomas says “Not until October 1954, was the order given that all freight cars were to carry the “DB” ownership markings. So in the early days of the Bundesbahn, it was absolutely typical to see cars carrying zone markings, series designation and old road numbers, running side-by-side with DB lettered cars with new numbers.”
As the wagon fleet was repainted over time, the standard ownership markings became more commonplace, so by the mid-to-late 1950s, the typical open wagon would have looked like this example. It no longer carried a series name (like Halle, or Essen, or Breslau), but it still showed the wagon category of O. For this photo I am indebted to member Perz, it is a car from Marklin set 46021.



Article written by Kimball Thurlow 2015. Acknowledgments are shown in the text. Suggestions or corrections are welcome.

Edited by user 05 October 2015 10:39:42(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified