Angolan O&K - Feldbahn Museum
Saturday was one of three open days at the Feldbahnmuseum 500 e.V., located in a rural suburb south of Nüremberg. I had to walk 10 minutes from the bus stop to get there and was surprised to find lots of cars parked outside the place. CFF 764.376 (Resita 1957, ex Viseu de Sus) is plinthed at the gate together with the body of a DR covered wagon from Radebeul. I was later told that the Romanian loco had been acquired from CFI Criscior to be exchanged against the little Krauss that was back then part of the Marxzell collection/scrapheap. As the owner of the stuff at Marxzell didn’t want to sell the Krauss, the idea was to exchange it against another steam loco. After the Resita had been acquired he however changed his mind and sold the Krauss, the Resita stayed in the hands of the FM500. Inside, behind the brand-new storage building/museum hall, I was surprised to find that the whole railway is in fact built on a steep slope, with a steeply-graded line connecting the lower section and private garden railway with the upper loop. See http://www.feldbahn500.de/gleisplan_frameset.htm for a map of the railway. As everything is in the forest, only the plinthed Resita at the entrance can be seen on Google Earth. The big blue building at the bottom left is a museum and not (yet) connected to the railway. The roundhouse and two more sheds are in the garden of a private house and not accessible to visitors. The green and yellow buildings are temporary structures to eventually be replaced by permanent ones. A lot of space is needed to house the large collection of locos, which next to the two steam locos includes a compressed air loco, an electric loco, a petrol loco, 16 battery locos, 44 diesel locos, 2 monorail diesel locos and 408 wagons. After being welcomed by the lady who had taken my reservation on the phone, I made my way up the hill to the operating loop, where I could hear the Angolan O&K make it’s rounds.
Compania do Assucar de Angola (CAA) O&K 0-6-0T 12493/1934 (30 PS, 6.5t) used to operate at Tentativa sugar mill in Caixito, c. 60 km NE of Luanda. In the late 60s the mill had three of the 0-6-0Ts and nine diesels operational. No. 12493 together with another two locos of the same type (11112/1925 & 12140/1930) and a smaller 0-4-0T (10311/1922, 10 PS) were bought by Sandstone and shipped to South Africa. They were all in very poor condition, but have or are currently being restored to working order by Lukas Nel at Bloemfontein, with none of the drawings available to him. No. 10311, regauged to 24-in., was put back into service in April 2011, while No. 12493 was rebuilt and sold to the FM500 via Rüdiger Fach. The two other locos have also been regauged and are nearing completion.
The steam loco, hauling three purposedly-built passenger cars, was doing 2-3x 3 rounds on the upper loop before being taken out for water and servicing. During those times a Diema diesel was used with a rake of five small open cars. Before the completion of the passenger cars, three underground miner’s cars were used behind the steam loco.
I befriended whom I thought was one of the members of the FM500 Society, a Macedonian from Greece who was acting as a crossing keeper. He was keen to show me locos and equipment in the cordoned-off parts of the railway and when I asked him how many members the society had, he told me six. “Six, then it’s a very small society?” –“No, six full time employees”. It turns out the railway was started in 1976 by Karl Heinz Rohrwild, owner of the Dorfner Group, a 225 Million Euro company founded in 1949 and active in building cleaning, building management and catering. The group currently has over 10,000 active employees in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland. KH’s passion were 500mm gauge underground mining railways and as a result the major part of the loco collection comes from that area, from Germany, the Czech Rep. and Switzerland. Karl Heinz did all work on his railway by himself and in 2005 one of the locos he saved from certain death at the hands of the scrapman, a 6-ton beast, turned against him and run him over on the steeply-graded track left of the museum building. The Killer loco is still on site, next to the track and covered by a tarp. His sons decided to keep the railway and now employ six people permanently for trackwork, repairs and restoration of the rolling stock and to remove leaves and snow from the premises during the winter (for the snow they have an rotary snowplow – pics. 6709/6713).
The little inside-framed MÜNCHEN (Krauss No. 5745/1908, 20 PS, 4.9t) formerly operated at the Ludovici tile works near Mannheim. After the tile works were closed it spent years at Marxzell. KH had for a long time dreamed of acquiring it, but it was only after his that his son was able to buy it have it restored. It has been operational since 2009.
I got to talk to his son Karl Heinz’s son, Karlheinz Rohrwild, who now heads both FM500 and the Dorfner Group. He showed me all the locos I was interested to see. He lives in the 2nd house to the left of the museum compound (the one with the roundhouse in the garden), while Karl Heinz’s widow lives in the house to the far right. The house to the left is also owned by the family, but has been rented out. At the top of the slope the family has acquired some more land onto which they hope to extend the railway, but still need the permission from the local authorities. No locos can operate on the steeply-graded track connecting the bottom and top sections, when locos need to be taken up or down they are hauled via a cable by battery loco at the top.
As it runs mostly through the forest, photography is challenging and the settings on my camera must have been wrong as most of my non-sunny pictures were washy. There is a small pond along the track, a small bridge and luckily at the far right side of the loop, where the line runs on a gradient, there is a large clearing which allows sunny shots in the afternoon.
My new Greek friend told me that FM500 operates charter trains for small groups. Sadly, the large wagon collection does not include any cane wagons, but I guess a long rake of tipper wagons behind the O&K would also do
Clck here to read more: http://www.feldbahn500.de/index.htm.
Article by: Thomas Kautzor
