For a moment, the dark tunnel of German fir trees looked familiar, the view from the seat opposite the Lokfahrer offering me the best chance of spotting anything familiar at 150 km/h (93 mph).  A temporary restriction for a highway overpass construction project brought the needle on the speedometer in the cab car down, down, and for a moment we were traveling at the old Deutsche Reichsbahn crawl across the invisible border between former West and East Germany.  If the geography had not been so familiar, I would have missed it.

The last time that I rode this line was in 1971, and it then took twelve minutes of methodical steaming to travel from Marienborn in Saxon-Anhalt to Helmstedt in Lower Saxony, covering the nine kilometers at an average speed of 45 km/h (just under 30 mph).  Marienborn was a dot on the map that had become the border control point for the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Soviet Zone of post-World War II Occupied Germany.  And Helmstedt was the sudden border town of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), part of the British Zone.  To Americans, this county seat town had become the home of Checkpoint Alpha, first of a tenuous trio of U.S. Military Police offices that ended at a street corner face-off in Berlin - Checkpoint Charlie.

From 1945 until 1990, Military Trains of the three Western Allies, the U.S., Britain and France, had traversed this line, operated by crews of the Deutsche Reichsbahn.  East of Marienborn, Soviet Army trains shared the route.  Today, the main line of the Cold War is a secondary service, but by linking regional schedules together, a traveler can retrace this path and observe the progress being made by today's Deutsche Bahn and the on-line communities that it serves.

(Continued)

by R. W. Rynerson

previously published in condensed form

in Rail Travel News.

Across An Imagined Border