The Berlin-Frankfurt duty train is one of two US Army trains that goes to Berlin on a daily basis to meet the needs of the US garrison located there. The other train is the Berlin-Bremerhaven duty train that originates in Bremerhaven and carries a large amount of freight which has arrived there by ship. Both trains are operated by the Transportation Division, Berlin Brigade.

The Frankfurt train is comprised of sleepers, and freight and utility cars. Some of the sleepers are owned by the Transportation Corps, others are leased from the Bundesbahn. The cargo-carrying cars are usually outnumbered by the sleeping cars. Since the duty trains run on an overnight schedule, they only carry sleeping cars to transport personnel instead of passenger coaches.

Freight wise, the train carries a cargo of bakery goods, baggage and other odds and ends as well as classified materiel in the custody of couriers.

Personnel wise, the train carries people on leave or on duty status. (The majority of the passengers are typically people on leave.) About 80,000 people travel on the duty trains every year. Travel on the duty train is limited to servicemen, their US passport-carrying dependents and US civilians employed by the Department of Defense.

The Frankfurt duty train leaves Frankfurt shortly after 8:30 pm. The Bremerhaven duty train leaves Bremerhaven about one hour later. Traveling a shorter route, the Bremerhaven train usually clears the checkpoint at Helmstedt (the terminus in West Germany of the rail line to Berlin) about one hour before the Frankfurt train.

At about the same time that the two eastbound trains leave the main train stations (Hauptbahnhof) in Frankfurt and Bremerhaven, their counterparts leave the Lichterfelde Bahnhof in Berlin for the westbound return run.

The duty train carries on board a control crew that consists of
a US train commander (a Transportation Corps officer)
a US train conductor (a Transportation Corps NCO)
one interpreter-translator
two US military policemen (1)
one Signal Corps radio operator

The control crew operates from the control car which is located just back of the engine. The control car is outfitted to serve as a headquarters (but part of the space is used for baggage). (There are also frequent special trains from Belin to Bremerhaven that are made up solely of freight cars - no passenger cars. Theses trains have a control car on each end and thay have six MPs in the control crew.) (Webmaster note: not mentioned in the article is the civilian crew on the train staffed by the DSG (porters/Schaffner) or Bundesbahn (West)/Reichsbahn (East) (train conductors/Zugführer).)

Travel authority - The soldier traveling to Berlin needs travel authority such as travel or leave orders, a request to travel to Berlin (AE Form 2793), flag orders from the USAREUR AG section (2), and an ID card in good condition. The requirements for the dependent or government-employed civilian is the same except that they need a valid passport instead of the ID card.

Key Stops
Helmstedt, West Germany -- at this stop on the border between West and East Germany, when traveling eastbound (towards Berlin), the Bundesbahn train crew gets off and a Reichsbahn crew gets on to take the train through the East Zone. The US control crew with the exception of the MP's and the NCO conductor) also gets off and will take the Frankfurt-bound train back to Frankfurt.

Marienborn, East Germany -- is the entry point into the East Zone coming from West Germany. At this stop the US train commander dismounts the train with all of the travel and identification documents of the passengers and meets with a Russian officer. The Russian painstakingly compares travel and ID documents to find discrepancies. This process usually takes one half hour. (During this time, the MPs who have also dismounted, are patrolling the area around the train.) If the Russian officer finds no problems with the documents, the train commander returns to the train, performs his own visual inspection of the train and then everybody boards again to continue the trip.

Potsdam, East Germany -- is the entry point into the East Zone coming from West Berlin. The same ritual described under Marienborn is performed at this stop when traveling westbound towards Frankfurt.

(1) The MP's are all from the Railway Security Section, 287th Military Police Company in Berlin.
(2) The "flag order" is so called because the travel authorization form - printed in English, French and Russian - has a colored US flag emblem on it.