Historic steam locomotives in the Harz Mountains

In the Harz Mountains, they still count as a tourist attraction: the historic steam trains that travel up to the Brocken. According to plan, the last steam locomotive in the GDR ran 35 years ago. The train ran between Magdeburg and Halberstadt on Oct. 29, 1988, says Rainer Mertens, deputy director of the German Railway Museum.

"The locomotive was a Class 50.35 recolocomotive," says the railroad historian. It had been assembled since 1957 from several of the Reichsbahn locomotives of the 1930s and 1940s, he said. After the last scheduled trip, the engine initially served as a switch heater and was used sporadically for historic trips.

"In 1991, private people from Erftstadt near Cologne acquired the locomotive, where it stood as a monument until 2016," Mertens says. Since 2020, he says, it has been restored to operational condition. In West Germany, the last scheduled steam locomotive ran eleven years earlier, on October 26, 1977.

Bahnhistoriker Mertens emphasizes, however, that even today steam locomotives would still run sporadically. For example, on the lines of the former DR narrow-gauge network, such as in the Harz Mountains. In addition, about 150 steam locomotives still run as museum locomotives on German tracks.