A beautiful steam locomotive, by many connoisseurs said as one of the finest ever built, the Bavarian S 3/6 # 18 478 or # 3673 (2 'C 1' "Pacific" or 4-6-2), built in 1918 by Maffei in Munich, is a four-cylinder compound locomotive for express trains. Today it is operational again for the Bavarian Railroad Museum in Nördlingen. On this day, she came with a train to Lindau over the line, where she was familiar over many years.
Text from the Bavarian Railway Museum Nördlingen:
The queen of all German express steam locomotives and since 1996 the star of the Bavarian Railway Museum, the S 3/6 3673, was built in 1918 by J. A. Maffei in Munich with the serial number 4536 for the Royal Bavarian State Railway. After stationing in Munich, Augsburg, Ingolstadt and most recently Lindau and Ulm, it was taken out of service in 1959 and acquired by the Swiss engineer Serge Lory in 1960. Lory set herself the goal of restoring the locomotive to its original Bavarian appearance. He has deliberately chosen the last S 3/6 with a characteristic wind cutting cab for this purpose. He began his work in Lindau and in 1966 he transferred the locomotive to Switzerland. According to our knowledge, it is doubtful whether Lory's aim was to make the locomotive operational again. Apparently, the reconstruction of the Bavarian image was in the foreground. Lory died over this project in 1981, but today we owe him the only S 3/6 in the appearance of the state railway time. After several changes of ownership in Switzerland, the locomotive was taken over by the Bavarian Railway Museum on loan in 1993. After a first optical reconditioning for the 25th anniversary of the BEM in 1994, the operational reconditioning was started with the help of Raw Meiningen and was successfully completed in the spring of 1996. The locomotive was used for the first time in May 1996 on the tour of Germany by the model railway manufacturer Märklin, whose 3700 km were mastered by the locomotive with flying colors, and has been owned by the Bavarian Railway Museum since 1997. Today, the locomotive again bears the original colours, whose colour shade was determined after extensive research and is likely to come very close to the original.
