Something about the author

It started with the model railway - that's also true for me. In 1967 I received on my 3rd bithday a Märklin railway, but the interest in this present was in the beginning very limited, so it was mostly used by my father. One of the reasons for this behaviour was the missing landscape on the railway plate, which was typically fixed on the wall and only sometimes tipped if playing was scheduled.

So I decided some years later, that some landscape and technical accesories like lamps or semaphores should be installed, so I started to change these things when I reached the age of 11 years. But already one year later, all this work had to be stopped, as the whole family moved to a new home, where I managed to receive a complete room in the cellar only for the model railway.

Not far away from the new house was the DB main line Hamburg - Hannover, which was visited quite often now, as watching the trains showed up as being quite interesting, too. I still remember very well, when I saw a DB class 150 locomotive the first time - a locomotive, which wasn't known from the Märklin catalogue to me (which was the most important source at this time). I was very astonished and told my friends that I have seen a loco, which looks like a class 140 with 12 wheels.

During the following years the interest in model railway decreased (the last big action was the move from Märklin to the international DC system), but on the other hand the interest in the "real railways" was becoming bigger and bigger. Especially all publications with statistical information on single locomotives found my interest. But finding new sources was difficult, so I was very lucky when I met Oskar Pieper at the beginning of the 1980ies. He had published some books on locomotive statistics in the 70ies (which was never finished). All the data he had collected during decades were the basis for our first common book project "Gesamtverzeichnis deutscher Lokomotiven" (="Complete Catalog of German Locomotives"). The first two volumes on the prussian Locomotives (til 1906) have been published, but the following volumes were not published (due to problems with the publisher). But they will come with the DGEG.

Two books with other subjects (DR locomotive stock in 1945/46 and the "Osthannoverschen Eisenbahnen" - the largest German private railway), were published some years later. Further publications folowed.

For some years I was also busy in the "museum railway scene". At the beginning of the 80ies I was involved in the refurbishment of the steam locomotive 41 360 at the depot Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck. In 1985 I started to organize with some friends public trips with different steam locomotives and diesel railcars. But these activities ended in the first half of the 90ies, so much more emphasis could be put on locomotive statistics again. Today my main interest is the verification of known data and the opening up of new, unknown information. These two goals shall be achieved by the systematic search for relevant information in different archives and the scientific evaluation of these data. May be this sounds a bit stuck up, but during my study of electrotechniques and the subsequent work in software development I learned to do this work in a precise way. And if you do the historical research on locomotive history in a similar way, you will find out that a lot of information are "invented" (or they were always changed a bit when being copied from different authors). When I started the research for my OHE book I had to make this experience quite often.

At the end, a few words on my main interests. During the last years I specialised my work on the history of the locomotives and railcars of the German state owned railways. I also tried to stay up to date concerning the rolling stock of the German private railways, but I gave up this effort on the locomotives working for industrial use. If you are interested in the history of German locomotives, it is necessary to also work on other European railways (due to the exchange of rolling stock during the two world wars). This kind of interest is still growing (for myself) - on the other hand is the interest in non european railways quite limited.

The author during one of his first railway excursions - the interest in the old prussian locomotives is already in young years existing. And if you ask yourself whom we are talking about - well, it's the person that just found out that the T3 doesn't have the original buffers anymore.