Palatinate Railways No. 26 to 63

The locomotives of the Pfalzbahn with the numbers 26 to 63 were express locomotives, 17 of which have been produced since 1853 by the Esslingen and Maffei machine works. With the Crampton design, smoother running was achieved and speeds could be reached that were actually said to be unrealistic up to this point. Despite the fact that the drive wheels were only 1,830 mm in size, this type is said to have reached speeds of up to 120 km/h. The French Crampton locomotives, which were also designed for 120 km/h, had a wheel diameter of more than 2,100 mm.

However, this advantage was paid for by the fact that the large driving wheels behind the boiler could only provide a small adhesive weight and therefore little traction was available. The adhesive weight was 9.2 tonnes for the first engines and reached 9.7 tonnes for the last ones, what at that time was sufficient for an express locomotive. The locomotives were not only used on flat lines, but also had to cope with gradients of up to 0.7 percent in the Palatinate Forest.

The Pfalzbahn began scrapping the first engines in 1891. The last one disappeared in 1896, when the considerably more modern P 2.I with the wheel arrangement 2-4-2 were already available. In 1925, a replica of the locomotive with the name “Die Pfalz” was built and ten years later it took place in the centenary of the German railways in Nuremberg.