>>1326000I went to a train museum in Halle, Germany 2 years ago.
Mainline steam locomotives are really quite something there. They're longer and more powerful in low speed torque to get moving, but they're pretty efficient at their jobs and they have very large coal and water tenders, plus smoke guards keep smoke away from passengers.
There are still a lot of German steam locomotives still functional. In the German Democratic Republic, the Deutsche Reichsbahn has to convert many locomotives, which were optimised for coal from the Ruhr, into using bunker fuel from Siberia. They had to use this as the Soviet Union took away the East German electric locomotives and electrification equipment was "war reparations". DR operated steam locomotives running on bunker fuel until the early 1960s, when Ukrainian diesel locomotives started becoming available.
But the 1980s, East German electrification was reestablished, and the GDR entered the area of electric locomotive construction.
