In 1916 railway officials had to concede that there was no heavy freight locomotive adequate to the task of hauling heavy military supply trains in the inventory of any of the german state railways. Prodded by the German General Staff, the Prussian Ministry of Public Works initiated design of a new heavy freight locomotive. The first exemplars of the new class G 12.2 were ready by 1917. It incorporated the most advanced design features known to German locomotive designers of the day. Although none of those features were entirely new, their combination was, breaking with established design practices for freight locomotives of the Prussian State Railways, and the other German State Railways as well.
Intended a heavy freight locomotive it had five coupled axles of 1400 mm diameter and a leading Bissel-type truck. The latter was a design feature German locomotive designers had quite reluctantly come to accept with freight locomotives. It did, however, permit the maximum speed to be fixed at 65 km/h as opposed to the 45 - 50 km/h permitted for five-coupled freight locomotives without leading truck.The Bissel type truck allowed 80 mm radial play of the leading axle towards either side. The second and fifth driven axle were given 25 mm lateral play. The axles were borne in an american style bar frame, which State Railways in Southern Germany had started to use in the preceding decade. Unlike the more powerful South German locomotives of the day, the G12.2 was powered by a 3 cylinder single expansion steam engine with cylindrical valves, Heusinger-Walschaerts valve gear and operating with superheated steam. The large boiler rested on top of the frame allowing a wide grate with large grate area. Because of this, the centreline of the boiler was at an unprecedented hight of 3,0 m abouve ground level. The firebox was of the Belpaire type. It was also one of the first locomotives using a surface feedwater preheater in conjunction with a steam powered piston pump. As a second, independent boiler feed pump it retained the two injectors commonly found with steam locomotives at that time. One of these was later removed, once the reliability of the piston feed pump during day to day operation had been established.
Except for the Belpaire type firebox, all major design features were incorporated into the set of general principles which governed design of the standardized locomotive types, Deutsche Reichsbahn was to introduce 10 to 15 years later. The G12.2 was therefore dubbed as the first of the German standard locomotives by some railway autors. It certainly constituted an important step towards the modern, standardized designs of later years.
It was also the first Prussian designed locomotive procured in considerable numbers by the state railways of Alsace-Lorraine, Baden, Württemberg and Saxony.
Locomotive No. 982 is one of the second batch built by Maschinenfabrik Karlsruhe for the Baden State Railways in 1919. In contrast to those of the first and forth batch it has seperate sand boxes before and behind the steam dome. This arrangement was chosen because of complaints about insufficient flow of sand, presumably because of the shallow gradient of some of the sand pipes in the earlier version. Since the separation of steam dome and sand boxes answered better, all locomotives with the central dome were eventually rebuilt to the new arrangement.
After the merger to Deutsche Reichsbahn the locomotives were reclassified as class 58 and used almost everywhere in Germany except the costal plains in Northern Germany. In West Germany they were retired from service during the 1950s. In East Germany they continued to operate until the middle of the 1970s. A number of the East German locomotives underwent considerable modernisation during the 1960s, altering their appearance considerably. Those rebuilt locomotives were reclassified as class 58.30 and used until the fall of the iron curtain. A G12 of Baden origin was purchased from East Germany's Deutsche Reichsbahn in the 1980s and maintained in a operational state by a West German preservation society named Ulmer Eisenbahnfreunde. During summer weekends it often hauls tourist trains on the Albtal line in the northern Black Forest. In 2004 extensive restauration has started at the repair shops of the Albtal Verkehrs Gesellschaft, which has a long record of allowing and supporting operation of steam trains on her tracks. A number of other exemplars are found in various stages of preservation at railway museums in Germany and Poland.
Тип: traincar