| Steam locomotive with tender
Express steam locomotive, road number 18 323, with a type 2´2 T29,6 coal tender, German Federal Railroad (DB). Former Baden class IVh. Experimental locomotive at the German Federal Railroad Experimental Office in Minden. Black/red basic paint scheme. Witte smoke deflectors and an inductive magnet on the engineers side. Smokestack with a Caledonian rim. The locomotive looks as it did around 1966.
The locomotive has an mfx+ digital decoder and extensive sound functions. It also has controlled high-efficiency propulsion with a flywheel in the boiler. 3 axles powered. Traction tires. The locomotive and tender are constructed mostly of metal. There is a factory-installed smoke generator in the locomotive. It has dynamic smoke exhaust that varies with the locomotive speed and is digitally controlled. The triple headlights change over with the direction of travel, will work in conventional operation, and can be controlled digitally. The cab lighting, running gear lights, and firebox flickering can be controlled separately in digital operation. Maintenance-free warm white and red LEDs are used for the lighting. There is an adjustable close coupling with a guide mechanism between the locomotive and tender. There is a close coupler with an NEM pocket on the tender. The buffer height on the locomotive and tender adheres to the NEM.
Source: www.maerklin.de
They were elegant, well-designed, powerful, and real locomotive legends: The Bavarian class S 3/6 provincial railroad express locomotives and the Württemberg class C both wrote railroad history as well as the very modern four-cylinder Pacific, the Baden IVh, of which 20 units were built by 1920 by J. A. Maffei in Munich. The class 18.3 units as these high wheel and around 2,000 horsepower locomotives were designated on the German State Railroad reliably pulled for years such famous trains as the Rheingold or the Riviera-Naples-Express among other trains on the Mannheim – Basle race track. After 1945 their fate as a splinter class appeared sealed however, and the scrap yard threatened. Then Theodor Düring, manager of the German Federal Railroad Central Bureau and a big fan of these powerful provincial railroad beauties, entered the scene and had road numbers 18 323, 18 316, and 18 319 overhauled and updated for challenging service on experimental runs. They turned in excellent results and were used in tests of new types of locomotives all over West Germany. Dürings closet of rarities also included a Bavarian S 3/6, and this locomotive attracted a great deal of attention among more than just railroaders. In 1956, road number 18 316 reached a record run of 162 km/h / 101 mph. Road number 18 323 ran the longest and from the mid-Sixties to its retirement at the end of 1969 it was a star on many sold out special runs. Masses of people often admired this steam locomotive giant especially in the Baden region, where it had started its career 50 years before. Many railroaders had never forgotten these racers. An Offenburg locomotive engineer is said to have made the following remark wistfully: There will never be another good locomotive like the Maffei unit. Still two of these good Maffei units have been preserved: Road numbers 18 323 and 18 316 harken back in Offenburg and Mannheim to this Baden-Bavarian tour de force in German locomotive construction. |
