FD Königssee Passenger Car Set

Family vacation by train: Board the train, feel comfortable, enjoy the scenery passing by, and arrive fully relaxed at your holiday destination. For decades that was no fiction in this country, but rather an offer that opened up the most beautiful and popular holiday areas in Germany. At first it was through cars that brought people in search of recuperation directly to the places of longing. In the Economic Miracle years large organizers such as Touropa or Scharnow and later TUI even introduced their own tourism trains that very successfully defied the rubber competition and the introduction of air tourism. The German Federal Railroad brought full tourism trains into the plan at the end of the Seventies. There was a desire to mix in this market with its own concept. In 1983, a new train class then appeared in the schedule books: The long-distance express, shortened to FD, was planned to produce "fast and comfortable direct connections from the urban areas to areas of interest to tourists". Analog to the extremely successful IC79 trains the railroad insisted exclusively on daytime trains. They connected Northern Germany and the Ruhr area all year with destinations of interest to tourists chiefly in Southern Germany and Austria. Modern, 200 km/h / 125 mph fast cars pulled by new three-phase current class 120 locomotives offered a comfortable trip similar to trains such as the TEE and InterCity trains. In addition to winter sports fans, hiking vacationers, and spa guests, the DB also wanted to appeal to families for whom a trip by auto for hours over clogged freeways was often a form of torture. For that reason, the FD "Königssee" Hamburg - Berchtesgaden, the longest domestic German FD train run, ran a children's car in the consist. A cafeteria was set up in one half of the car and in the other half a spacious children's play area. In 1988, ten FD pairs of trains controlled tourist traffic to the Black Forest, Lake Constance, the Bavarian Forest, the Allgäu area, and chiefly the most beautiful regions in the Bavarian Alps. Through cars ran to Schruns, Klagenfurt, and Zell am See. The FD connection gave numerous stations on branch lines the wide and comfortable world of long-distance service. Examples are Seebrugg in the Black Forest, Füssen, Oberstdorf, and Bad Wörishofen in the Allgäu area, Bayerisch Eisenstein in the Bavarian Forest as well as Lenggries, Tegernsee, and Berchtesgaden in the Alps. The star train of the FD through lines was undoubtedly the already mentioned FD "Königssee". This was not only due to the children's car. Since 1988 it had run in a first partial section of the new high-speed line Hannover – Würzburg at scheduled speeds of 200 km/h / 125 mph. That only worked with airtight cars. For that reason, it received the first air-conditioned IC cars in second class too as an FD train as well as a modern IC dining car. The children's compartment was installed in a type Bpmz 291.2 open seating car set up for the purpose. This FD 1980/1981, which looked almost like a normal IC, was however only a very short, but extremely interesting chapter in the history of the German Federal Railroad. For the cars were repainted after only a short time in the new paint scheme of long-distance blue / pastel blue / light gray. Only the class 120 locomotives for motive power kept their red paint scheme with bibs. After the introduction in 1988 of the Interregio trains (IR), the FD star began to sink rapidly. The DB had marketed the IR as the "train for feeling comfortable" and claimed the vacation areas were better served with this type of train. The reality looked rather different. The IR routes were mostly shorter, and they often did not go to the holiday stations served by the FD trains. This thus required changing trains and the feeling comfortable effect of the IR trains did not reach the FD trains. Nothing helped. In 1993, after ten years the FD trains disappeared from the DB schedules and the ostensible feel comfortable successor, the IR, survived only until shortly after the turn of the millennium. Only the FD "Königssee" in 1:87 scale can still tell the story of the children's area in a comfortable DB vacation train.