August master

August Meister (born June 5, 1873 in Zurich ; died May 26, 1939 in Berlin ) was a German - Swiss locomotive designer. He played a key role in the design of the standard steam locomotives for the Deutsche Reichsbahn .

Life

August Meister was born in Zurich in 1873 as one of ten children of Ulrich and Anna Meister. His father was an assembly foreman at the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Factory (SLM) in Winterthur , the family came from Feuerthalen near Schaffhausen . August Meister spent his childhood there and in Pfungen . After completing his school days partly in Zurich and partly in Schaffhausen, Meister began an apprenticeship in the SLM design office with the chief designer there, Olaf Kjelsberg . He supplemented this training with his own book studies and additional specialist courses, but never took an exam.

At the age of 23, he switched to German locomotive construction in 1896. After brief employment at various companies, he worked from 1897 under August Trick at the Esslingen machine factory . In Esslingen he married his wife Anna Maria, née Amsler, from Winterthur in 1899 at the age of 25. Between 1901 and 1907, both had four children, two sons and two daughters each. His son August Meister jr. later followed him in a professional career as a mechanical engineer. In 1903 Meister went to Berlin to Borsig , where he succeeded the previous chief designer Charles King, an Englishman, in 1912. He stayed in this position for the next 18 years. In the years that followed, many well-known locomotive series for German and foreign railways were developed under Master's aegis.

After the merger of the previous state railways to form the Deutsche Reichsbahn, further locomotive procurement had not yet been determined. First of all, tried and tested series of regional railways were to be procured as so-called "Reichsbahnbauarten". As early as 1921 , Hinrich Lübken , who was then the head of design at the Reichsbahn Central Office , presented a first draft of a series of types for new standard locomotives drawn up by Meister to the competent Reichsbahn committee. The committee then recommended that the Reich Ministry of Transport should develop new standard locomotives instead of purchasing the regional railway series. From 1922 on, August Meister took over the management of the unification office of the German locomotive factories in parallel to his duties at Borsig. This office was founded by the Association of the German Locomotive Industry , a predecessor of today's Association of the Railway Industry , to take over the planning of the planned standard locomotives for the Reichsbahn. The office was located near Borsig in Berlin-Tegel , where engineers from all German locomotive factories were subordinate to foremen. Together with Richard Paul Wagner , Hinrich Lübken's successor as the responsible design department at the Reichsbahn-Zentralamt, he steered and coordinated the development work. After disputes between Borsig and other locomotive factories over an order from Yugoslavia, other companies such as Henschel and Maffei criticized the close ties between the unification office and Borsig, both spatially and personally. In 1930 he therefore resigned from the post in the unification office in order to concentrate on the tasks at Borsig. At the same time, Tegel's office was relocated to the premises of the locomotive industry association in Berlin-Mitte.

In the course of the global economic crisis , Borsig also got into economic turmoil. In 1930 locomotive construction was first outsourced. It was taken over by AEG . Locomotive construction was given up in Tegel in 1934 and merged with AEG Lokomotivbau in Hennigsdorf as Borsig-Lokomotiv-Werke GmbH Hennigsdorf (BLW) . The parent company Borsig went bankrupt at the end of 1931 and, together with the Tegel plant, was taken over in 1933 by the armaments company Rheinmetall , which is largely owned by the Reich . Meister stayed in Tegel, since then his field of work no longer included the construction of locomotives. The focus of his work was the construction of light steam boilers and steam engines , but also the design of steam railcars for the Reichsbahn. The result was the DR 51 to 53 , DR 54 to 58 steam railcars delivered from 1932 to 1935, as well as the DR 59 railcar, which was delivered in 1937, and was designed to burn coal tar oils produced from domestic fuels in the course of the Third Reich's efforts to become self-sufficient .

In July 1938, Meister retired. He died less than a year later on May 26th in Berlin.

Constructions

The preserved locomotive “MAMMUT” of the “Animal Class” of the HBE designed by August Meister, here under the series number 95 6676 of the Deutsche Reichsbahn 2008 in Rübeland

Meister was responsible for some of the most important locomotive designs at Borsig. Among other things, the Prussian P 10 was built for the Prussian State Railways at Borsig in 1919 . An essential step in the abolition of the expensive and operationally cumbersome cogwheel operation on various German low mountain ranges was the heavy "animal class" developed by him together with Otto Steinhoff , the director of the Halberstadt-Blankenburg Railway (HBE) , a 1'E1'h2 tank locomotive , which enabled the abolition of the cogwheel operation on the Rübelandbahn of the HBE. It served as a model for the Prussian T 20 , which was also developed under Meister's direction and which carried passenger and freight trains on steep routes in the Thuringian Forest until the 1980s .

In 1924 Meister drew the drafts for the pre-series locomotives of the S (II) series for the Danske Statsbaner .

The standardization office headed by Meister designed the most important series of standard steam locomotives for the Reichsbahn until 1930 . These included the DR series 01 as a heavy express train locomotive and the series 43 and 44 as heavy freight locomotives.

At Borsig, Meister was also responsible for various export orders, including the JDŽ 05 , JDŽ 06 and JDŽ 30 series , which were designed according to the development principles of the Reichsbahn standard locomotives for Yugoslavia . With this order, Borsig and Schwartzkopff undermined the originally set joint price of the German locomotive construction association, which ultimately led to Meister's resignation from the management of the standardization office.

literature

• Alfred Gottwaldt : Memory of August Meister at Borsig . in: Lok-Magazin 157, July / August 1989, pp. 266–278
• Alfred Gottwaldt: Wagner's standard locomotives: The steam locomotives of the Reichsbahn and their creators , EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3882557381 , pp. 144–146

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jürg Zimmermann: The importance of Swiss technology in historical-biographical documents, in: Ferrum: News from the Iron Library, Foundation of Georg Fischer AG, Volume 64, 1992, pp. 23–31
2. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: Wagner's standard locomotives: The steam locomotives of the Reichsbahn and their creators , EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3882557381 , p. 54
3. ↑ DSB damplokomotiv litra S - The store tendermaskine. In: sundborg.wordpress.com. September 17, 2011, accessed October 18, 2016 (Danish).