NS series 4100

After the war several German locomotives saw service in the Nederlandse Spoorwegen. Many of them were never active because of their sad state of maintenance and lack of spare parts. Amongst those locos were no less than 39 examples of the series 55.25-26. These engines were the heavy duty version of the Prussian G8 locomotives. This was the largest series of locomotives built in Germany before WW II. From 1913 to 1921 no less than 5260 of these G8.3 locomotives were built, of which 4948 were for the Prussian Railways, 157 for other German railways and 155 were exported to Belgium and France among others. They saw service during both world wars. In 1944 a large number of German steam locomotives, including ones from this series, were re-assigned to the Netherlands in order to cope with the domestic railway strike, which had started in September of that year. As with most German locomotives that were left in the Netherlands after the war, these G8.3 engines were in sad repair and most were barely suitable for service. The least damaged examples were distributed amongst several depots and painted, after which they went into regular service and the unrepairable ones were salvaged for their parts. After service implementation by the NS in June of 1945 they were initially numbered 4301-4339, in October of that year they were re-numbered into series 4101-4139. (And that makes you wonder how Fleischmann came up with the number 4147 for this model?). In 1947 all locomotives were returned to their original owner.

In 1995 Fleischmann released a limited run reproduction (1500 pieces) of engine 4105 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands. 4105 originally wore number 4004 right after the war and was renumbered twice afterwards, first to 4305 and later to 4105. This engine was built in 1924 as run-number 7393 and delivered as Hannover 5165 by Hanomag to the Prussian Railways (KPEV). The NS 4105 was numbered 55 3100 by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and initially saw service in and around Hengelo in passenger and freight traffic. For this model the motor is in the tender and the unit is equipped with close couplers front and back as well as between the engine and the tender. Now that I have a scanner, look at the nice job Fleischmann did with this limited edition and compare it with the early version I have; there are quite a few differences.
4105
4105
4105

The bulk of this information came from an article dealing with the 4105 model in the Dutch magazine "miniatuur BANEN" 1995/4. The colour pictures came from an Otto Simon advertisement in the June/95 issue of "Rail Magazine".
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Pages last updated April 9th, 2000