Exberliner Issue 167, January 2018

TRAINS
OBSESSIONS
Trains on
the brain
Cameron Cook enters the
wide-eyed world of German
trainspotters, steam train drivers
and model train collectors.
Like most people I know, I don’t think
about trains that often. They’re a utilitarian
public transport option, a way
to get from here to there. I don’t get excited
when boarding an ICE or stepping onto the
S-Bahn during a morning commute. But there
are thousands and thousands of people in this
country who do. To Germany’s train enthusiasts,
the Deutsche Bahn is not a source of
maddening commuter delays – it’s a symbol
of national pride, ingenuity and technical
prowess. For them, merely glimpsing
a certain type of train as it speeds
by their station can be the highlight
of their week. Some of them collect
hundreds of model trains, some learn
about European train history, some go
on international trainspotting holidays,
and some even enter the railway profession,
if they can realise their passion
early enough. And as it turns out, many
of them are right here in Berlin.
TRAIN-ING DAYS
My clued-in friends told me that if
I was looking for a train nerd, I had
to meet Holger. A man in his early forties
dressed casually in a blue hoodie and glasses,
Holger Köhlert has worked for some iteration
of the Deutsche Bahn for most of his career,
and looks the part, with the quiet and studious
air of someone who has spent a lifetime
in the public sector. Born and raised in the
East German region of Mecklenburg, he currently
works as both a driver and teacher for
the train company’s long-distance branch. I
took the tram to our meeting from my station
in Wedding, and when I mention this
to Holger, he tells me that trams are how his
obsession with public transport began.
“I love old tram cars,” he says, trying
to keep his bushy mustache out of the
foam in his Milchkaffee. “When I was a kid
I would take the tram to visit my dad at
work. This particular line worked with very,
very old tram cars, from the 1920s.” This, I
later realise, is a common thread with train
enthusiasts – it’s not just about the trains
“If I ask them how many locomotives
they own, even if
they have thousands, they’ll
say, ‘Oh, about 80.’ They
don’t want to tell others how
many they actually have.”
themselves, but the eras they’re from, the
nostalgia they provoke. “I loved the open
doors, how the driver stood and worked. Today,
you have one tram driver who sits with a
small joystick, but the old drivers had brakes,
controls, everything, and they really gave it
their all.” From trams, young Holger soon
graduated to trains, as his mother regularly
took him on trips to Leipzig when his father
was working there. “For a long time, Leipzig
Hauptbahnhof was the biggest train station
in Germany. For a little boy, this huge building
with its giant locomotives were completely
impressive.” Noticing that their son
had been bitten by the train bug, the whole
family got on board. “My father bought a
lot of railway and train books for me, and
my grandfather bought me model railways –
three different sets.”
But it’s not until he visited a steam locomotive
exhibition in his tweens that Holger
fell for trainspotting: the practice of waiting
near tracks or at stations for certain types of
trains to pass by, photographing them, and
thus “collecting” all the different models.
Berlin has an especially prominent trainspotting
scene – these days, there are even Instagram
accounts like @trainsberlin that scour
the outskirts of the city for the best spots.
Holger’s first time was decidedly more lo-fi.
“My first pictures were horrible!”, he says,
chuckling. “They were blurry shots of the train
going by!” But he kept at it, and it was through
this hobby that he eventually entered the professional
railway industry. “Through trainspotting,
I got involved with a tram enthusiast club
where I could actually work on trams and train
engines. By that time, I had decided I wanted
to be a train driver, but my mom thought it
was dangerous – that year, there had been a big
accident near Berlin where a Soviet tank and
a train collided. So the compromise was that I
could go to the club’s workshop to learn to be
a locomotive mechanic.”
By the time he had passed the exams, the
Wall had fallen. “So I’d started in the GDR,
but became a driver in the new Germany.”
Eventually he worked for the Bundesbahn, the
federal German railway.
If you’ve ever had an in-depth discussion
with someone who has a favourite train
model (Holger’s is the East German-manufactured
Class 228 engine locomotive, by the
way), the amount of historical, technical and
colloquial knowledge they possess is truly as-
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EXBERLINER 167