[PRCo] Rogues Gallery Candidate in Germany

[Fred Schneider]

This has nothing to do with Pittsburgh.  Nothing at all to do with  
western Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Eastern Ohio.   It's just a  
funny picture.
The picture that Encarta is going to strip out of this and put into a  
link below is not one of us but it is good for a laugh.  The "little  
man" calls it Biting the Bullet ... the person who sent it to me is  
the man biting the bullet or kissing the train or whatever.   He's  
Dan Joseph, a bus driver for Chicago Transit Authority and a very  
active member of the Central Electric Railfans Association.   He  
organized the trip to Russia, Estonia and Latvia in 2004, a wonderful  
trip during which I actually got a chance to run an MU train of Tatra  
cars on a street in Daugapils, Estonia.   Yes, Dan is rather  
short ... when I asked how I would recognize him, he simply said,  
shortest man in the crowd.

Where was the picture taken? ... Leipzig, in the former Deutsche  
Demokratische Republik or DDR.   It was once anything but  
democratic ... that was communist East Germany.    Berlin is the  
largest city in Germany with 3.4 million people.   Leipzig is the  
second largest in the former DDR with 505,000.   Dresden is third in  
the east with 500,000.   Bullet trains? The Commies didn't have  
anything like this.   This is all since the world turned.

The DB once stood for Deutsche Bundesbahn or German Federal Railway,  
the western company.   In the DDR, the railroad was DR or Deutche  
Reichbahn.   Reich being an Empire.   Today its a privatized company  
everywhere ... Deutchebahn or German Railway.

Isn't it a marvelous train station.   Three completely separate  
arched sheds each covering four tracks.    Es ist fantastisch!   And  
out in front you will still see tram cars.   The Deutschebahn  
Kurzbuch (their version of the Official Guide) still weighs like a  
big city telephone directory, totally unlike Amtrak's little system- 
wide folder.   I have one acquaintance who manages DB's Oberbayern  
Region in München (Munich to most Americans).   He is responsible for  
more trains in one day than the combined total for the Long Island,  
Amtrak, Metro North, New Jersey Transit and Connecticut DOT running  
into New York City.    And Munich is a small city with only 840,000  
inhabitants.   Imagine what his counterparts in Berlin or Hamburg  
contend with?    It has something to do with the difference between 1  
or 2 percent of us using public transportation to go to work and 30  
percent of them.

I know Dan was going on some sort of a tour of railfan tour of  
Germany.   One of our other friends living in Delaware just came  
back.  And like all railfan tours, they probably saw their fair share  
of museums and steam engines, etc.

On my first tour of the DDR, back when it was still a separate  
communist country, I was standing in the parking lot in front of a  
Hauptbahnhof (main train station) in Dresden when I stranger started  
to converse with me in German.   It was late in the day and I just  
didn't feel like struggling in German.   To dissuade him I answered,  
"Mein Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut.  Konnen Sie English sprechen."   I  
figured telling him my German was no good and asking him to speak  
English would get him to leave me alone.   Instead he answered in  
very crisp British accented English, "As a matter of fact, I can  
speak English."   Turns out his uncle had a business in England and  
he moved there during World War II to escape Germany.   Then he  
proceeded to regale this American for the next fifteen minutes about  
how beautiful Dresden had been before the fire storm in 1944 or  
1945.  What a serendipitous experience.   I'm glad he didn't let me go.

And now the pitch ... go, see it, you'll enjoy it.   No place on the  
planet is perfect.   We're not.  They're not.   Nor is any place all  
wrong.   It's amazing how looking at other places enriches the mind.

English is not commonly spoken in places like Leipzig or Dresden or  
anywhere in the former DDR.   But it was a very common second  
language in western Germany because we had Army divisions there plus  
the air force.   If any of you think you want to go to Germany to see  
what it's like, fear not about the language barrier.

I remember my wife once wanting to use up the last of her Germany  
Deutche Marks on her first trip to Germany ... this was long before  
the Euro became the EEC currency of choice.   We had come over on  
Iceland Air to Luxembourg so I took her to Kaiserslautern to spend  
the last money and simply turned her loose.  She was paranoid that  
they would not understand her.   I just smiled.   I understood what  
she did not.   Kaiserslautern had a population of 220,000 of which  
125,000 were U. S. servicemen and retired military personnel who  
chose to live in Germany.  There was also a Opal (General Motors)  
assembly plant there.   It is a totally bilingual city.   She walked  
into the first store, the sales clerk looked at what she was wearing,  
and said, "How may I help you, Madam?"    May not be the same today  
but it made a wonderful story.

I remember marching Dick Lloyd (the now deceased Superintendent of  
Transportation of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum) into the  
information office at Central Station, den Haag (the Hague),  
Netherlands.   The clerk immediately spoke to him in English.    
English is the most common second language in countries in Europe  
with minority languages (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Holland, northern  
Belgium, Portugal for example).   He was astonished.   To be an  
information clerk, each person had to be fluent in Dutch (Flemmish),  
English, French and German plus one other language of their choice.    
And we fight learning Spanish!

Dick got a sad lesson in how widespread English was on another  
trip.   He was critiquing a female motorman in Lisbon, Portugal in  
English.  It was obvious a supervisor was riding with her and that  
she was fairly new at the game but she was also proficient.   I was  
trying to signal Dick to muzzle his mouth but it wasn't getting  
through to him.   He felt in a Portuguese-speaking country he was  
safe.   Well, the supervisor got off to attend to something and told  
the lady to wait for a minute.   She turned around and looked  
straight at Dick and very crisply said, in English, "Does my  
operating of this car meet with your approval, Sir?"   He learned his  
lesson.   Maybe that had something to do with him landing in a London  
hospital with a stroke three days later.   I don't know.






-- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
-- Type: image/jpeg
-- Size: 3992k (4088281 bytes)
-- URL : http://lists.dementia.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/IMG_0622-1.JPG