Notes

Inspired by shenanigan87’s Portrait Steuerwagen, this is the other kind of single-level cab car that is common in Germany.

There is quite a variety of cab cars, actually. The Karlsruhe version you can see over at his image can only use the parallel control cable, which has the unfortunate side effect that a cab car can only be used with either diesel or electric, but takes several hours of conversion if you want to switch.

The Wittenberge head, which is shown here, uses ZMS, a digital serial format, which is used for both diesel and electric. It also features the new Einheitsführerstand (standard cab controls) that has been introduced with the class 111 and is still used today.

There are several variations of the Wittenberge head as well. No cars were ever built new with it, instead cars with older heads or no cab at all were re-built. Some are based on the “Silberling” type, the standard regional train carriage in western Germany, but there are already plenty of still-working cab cars present for that. Most of them are based on the Halberstädter, a very similar type of carriage built in the city of Halberstadt in the GDR. There never was a cab-car version of the Halberstädter car before that.

This picture is an old one from my collection, taken in Nordhausen.