The BR-52 Kriegslok (War Transitional)

The BR-52 was a unique locomotive, which came into existence because of German transportation needs during WWII. Working under the constraints of material and manpower shortages, the designers developed, step-by-step, a simplified configuration based broadly on the successful 2-10-0 BR-50 design.

The BR-50 was comprised of about 6,000 separate parts – this number was reduced to about 5000 for the BR-52 - and of these 5,000 parts, 3,000 were carefully designed for manufacturing simplicity. The BR-50 frames were fabricated from 80 mm (approximately 3.12 inch), bar steel while the BR-52 frames were fabricated from 30 mm,  (approximately 1.17 inch), steel plate. It required 17,650 man hours to build a BR-50 while a BR-52 could be built in only 11,650 man hours. The weight of a completed BR-52 and its Wannen, (bathtub), tender was 139 tons while the BR-50 and tender weighed in at 165 tons.

A total of 15,000 BR-52s were ordered and it was planned to manufacture 500 of them per month utilizing 15 separate construction sites. In reality, the production rate of 500 per month was only achieved for three months during 1943. About 6,000 BR-52s were manufactured during the war but the design was so successful that several hundred more were constructed after the cession of hostilities thus representing the largest production run in German railway history. This is a remarkable fact since the locomotive was originally expected to have an economically useful lifetime of only about five years!

Aster has chosen to model three BR-52 liveries in Gauge 1:

• 52 1325 of the Deutsche Reichsbahn as built by DWM in Posen; 

• 52 3322 built after the war by Jung for the Railway of the Saar; and

• 52 2347 built at the beginning of 1953 by Henschel and fitted with a chimney cap for frost protection but without Witte smoke deflectors - it is painted in the original war gray livery.