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

Hi Michael,
Thanks for your post.
The photographs you have added are useful to me.
I am guessing that the middle coal wagon set is 46030.

Interestingly, I have never seen a model of a DRG wagon with the lettering on my third photo.
(Examples now added in the text, 14/09/2015)

regards
Kimball

Edited by user 14 September 2015 09:35:47(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

This may be because it could take them into an area of markings using Nazi symbols which may fall foul of German law. I am not an expert on such stuff, but I beleive that markings on some of the streamlined loco models of the time are fudged so they don't have a swastika, but rather have an eagle.

Perhaps in the period of WW2 not so many wagons were produced at all.
Most wagons used were pre WW2.
M produced the 6 axle heavy load flatcars with DR markings,prototypes were used to move heavy tanks,such as the Tiger and Panther.

Recently i saw M producing flatcars with models of Messerschmidt Me-109 fighterplanes,be it these are the pre war versions without camouflage.

Artitec seem to have no problem in producing WW2 models with full markings,excellent models by the way.

For those interested in era II period of German railway history, there is an excellent text available on Amazon entitled "The Most Valuable Asset Of The Reich" by Alfred C. Mierzejewski (The University of North Carolina Press (c) 2000). There are two volumes - the first covering the years 1922-1932 (DRG) and then volume two, covering 1933-1945 (DRB).

In a chapter covering the years of retreat, the book details the number of cards produced in addition to redistribution of locomotives, passenger and freight cars from occupied areas of Europe to satisfy the demands of the German domestic demand as well as the demands of the "Östbahn", servicing the Eastern front and occupied areas East.

It notes that during the height of bombings within Germany in 1943, traffic levels remained high "Indeed, the Reichsbahn moved more freight in 1943 than at any other time in its history". This equated to 675 million tons of which 292.2 million tons were of coal.

A further interesting comment is that "the freight train schedule that had been shaped by Leibbrand during the 1920s and 1930s also remained essentially unchanged until the summer of 1944".

In the first week of August 1943, the DRB owned 808,900 serviceable freight cars. In addition, it was using 253,251 foreign freight cars, either in Germany or elsewhere. Of this total, 321,846 DRB freight cars were outside of Germany, most of them in the East. During this time, the DRB employed 1,529,000 people. It would have been common sight fro vehicles of the SNCF and SNCB to be found in Germany during this time.

The Reichsbahn began overloading its freight cars in short distance services by one ton in March 1937. Despite heavy opposition from the mechanical branch, the ZVL ordered the freight cars be overloaded by two tons each from 22 July 1942. Ore cars were to be overloaded by one ton.

To the question posed above regarding production of rolling stock during the war, Speer (with approval from Hitler) removed responsibility for the production of railway vehicle production from the DRB and established a committee responsible for meeting the "ambitious" target set by Hitler.

The following figures were extracted from the same text;

Reichsbahn Rolling-Stock Acquisitions, 1939–1944
Year Steam Locomotives Passenger Cars Freight Cars
1939 660 544 13,087
1940 982 713 24,544
1941 1,391 104 42,924
1942 2,127 124 43,032
1943 4,533 327 51,969
1944 3,063 256 34,725

It should be noted that a percentage of these were produced in the then occupied countries of France and Belgium however, the quantity and quality from these sources were understandably poor with a strong undercurrent of patriotism from railwaymen in those countries against serving the occupiers.

Anyone seriously looking to model either period of the DRG or DRB would be well advised to read these texts as they provide a fascinating insight to the machinations of railway policy and procedures during this time. I can only hope a similar text is produced for the Wirtschaftswunder (1950-1960) for which I am basing my layout.

Regards,

Michael.

Hi Michael,

Thanks very much for that enlightening precis of the railways after 1940.

I had guessed that little new production of railway vehicles occurred, but I was dead wrong.
I wonder if the railway paint shops were occupied more in lettering new vehicles, than refurbishing old ones.
Potentially from the figures quoted, at least 120,000 new freight vehicles after 1942, actually received the simplified DR with the series designation.

How quickly would these have been over-painted with the addition of the zone lettering after 1948?

regards
Kimball

Kimball,i will send you a PM on this one.

Bump. Great stuff here wrt to Era III livery.
Thank you Kimball.