Nearly 100 years old – 1925 built E77 10 at Dresden Hauptbahnhof on arrival with one of the special trains on December 11.
D LANGHAM
ONE of the oldest working electric locos in Europe returned to main line passenger work in late 2022 hauling special trains.
The loco, No. E77 10, was built by Lokomotivfabrik Krauss & Company in Munich in 1925 and was initially allocated to depots in Bavaria.
It was one of 56 similar 1-B-B-1 Class E77 machines. They worked passenger and freight trains around Leipzig and Halle and initially in Bavaria from 1923 until 1945, when 50 of the 53 that had survived the war in what became East Germany were shipped to the Soviet Union as wartime reparations. One loco survived in what was to become West Germany, but was scrapped in the 1960s and two others were scrapped earlier as beyond repair due to wartime damage. After use in the Moscow area, 38 of the locos were returned to East Germany in 1952-53 but most were not usable. Ten were overhauled and remained in use until the mid-1960s.