Dear friends.

I am interested in buying a locomotive Märklin 55441



I have a question with the smoke generator.
I would like to know if this locomotive has steam outlets at the bottom and by the whistle or only smoke comes out of the main chimney.


Thank you for helping me.

Don't!

That of course is a personal opinion, but it is based on owning one of these locos. Compared to the KM-1 models, these mid 2000's Marklin large steam locos are rubbish - that includes the BR01. Of course the KM-1 BR44 costs about twice what I paid for the BR44, but I'm wondering whether it would have been better to just spend the extra amount.....

The 55441 looks good, but I did have some issues with it. Whoever owned mine before me must have disassembled the tender, and then put it back together with a crooked rear axle, which caused derailments. They also took the smoke unit out of it and stuffed it down the inside of the tender. These of course are not design faults, but because of them I got some bad first impressions.

I also have a problem with the tender continually uncoupling from the tender due to bad design. It seems to work OK on my small oval with 1070mm radius curves, and a friend of mine who did some repair work on it also had trouble with the tender uncoupling although he did manage to get it running around his layout OK. Today we ran it on our club's G1 layout, which has 3m and 2m radius curves. The loco got about half way around then the tender uncoupled. I have a new drawbar for the loco which I bought as a 'just in case' purchase when I got some additional G1 couplers. I hope to fit the drawbar tomorrow and see if that fixes the problem.

The wiring loom from the tender to the loco is very stiff and inflexible, so if you don't set it right, it can cause derailments.

The current pickups on the rear tender can be a bit troublesome in not making good contact, and it is easy to have them short if you don't get reassembly right after trying to correct issues.

The smoke unit does smoke quite well, but as Markus suggests, you can get a bit of fluid over the body. I found out the hard way that the smoke unit on mine had been removed as I thought I'd try it out, then wondered why there was no smoke and smoke fluid was pouring out the bottom of the loco.....

Of course you can purchase whatever you want to purchase, but I would suggest you try and see it running for 10 or 15 minutes pulling a decent load before you commit to purchasing.



No, as Markus says, the loco only smokes out of the smokestack. If you want the other features, you will need to get the KM-1 BR44 (3200 euros), or wait until Marklin produces a BR44 with those features.

Thank you for your help