Old Stadler

On first glance, Stadler Rail, known in particular for the RegioShuttle, GTW and FLIRT EMUs and DMUs, looks like a very new company in the european railroading market. I certainly thought so, until I saw this in Interlaken Ost station.

This Tm 2/2 (not Trademark, just the letters, thank you Snow Leopard auto-correction) of Zentralbahn, nicknamed Chrigel for some reason, has no build date I could find, but the manufacturer was Elektrofahrzeuge Ernst Stadler, a small company producing nothing larger than this that went bankrupt in 1951 already. They started again, mainly as an in-house repair agency. They only reappeared again in 1990, producing a single two-axle EMU for a short line nobody ever heard of, being the only company really interested in the job. Since then, they've grown quite a lot — up to the point where they are offering double-decker intercity trains, which open access operator WESTbahn GmbH will operate in Austria on ÖBB's main line between Vienna and Salzburg starting in December 2011.

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