Portrait: Steuerwagen

Another pic that I didn't want to upload because to my mind, they didn't contain anything specacular or of interest for most people. But then again, about 99% of train pictures on DA are of American railroads and rolling stock, so I thought I'd put up as much German stuff, so people who might be interested in railroads of other countries have the chance to see what stuff we've got. As the only other people who upload pics of German trains are , and , I thought I'd add some of mine, even though the engines and cars have already been submitted by them.

Train related monologue follows:

So here we have a rather bug covered cab car in Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof, an ex-silverling car to be precise. The original livery consisted of no livery at all, as the cars where left unpainted, but had a certain pattern applied to it, known in German as "Pfauenmuster". Due to their polished and unpainted look, they became known as silverlings, and even though they are now painted red like everything regional, most railfans still refer to them as silverlings or ex-silverlings.

As you probably know, a cab car is a regular passenger car with a driver's compartment at the end, containing the same set of controls as found in the engine. The car is connected to the engine through a cable that can be seen here, basically enabling the engineer to remote control the engine, so that the engine doesn't have to go around the train when reversing at the terminus. Note the two sockets for such a cable left and right, the idle power cable tucked away behind its cover on the right side and a power socket on the left side beneath its flap. You can see The flap's handle under the lefthand buffer.
Other details include the socket under the left windshield, which is for the cable that enables the engineer to control certain things, like the destination indicator on newer cars, the speakers to inform passengers of the next stop and so on. The two little pipes that curve up towards the windshield are of course the washer system, something the engineer of this train probably didn't use very much, considering all those dead bugs. The grille-covered holes to the left and right of the destination indicator house the horn.

This type of car is still fairly common, you can check 's gallery, his part of the country sees them much more often than mine.

A very interesting and little known fact is that there was another type of essentially the same car, but it didn't have a full cab like this one. The plan was to keep the possibility to get from one car to another, but also have a control cab. The result was this. Engineers didn't really like to be cramped into that small compartment, and the car earned nicknames like rabbit's box or driver's toilet, before all such cars where converted to regular cab cars.

As you may have noticed, this train seems to have hit a bird with its left buffer... That must have hurt.

EDIT: Here's a recent deviation showing another "head" form used on these cars: [link]