The “great” railway photographers of the past have left us many outstanding pictures of long-gone railway eras. Written testimonies, on the other hand, are rare. Only by Carl Bellingrodt are there many maps written by himself, which – if they were not destroyed – found their way into the collections of one or the other collector. Of many, on the other hand, you rarely see written testimonies, if at all. We don’t even know the full names of others, let alone biographical data. One example is “cancer”. There are several pictures in Carl Bellingrodt’s legacies with the stamp “Krebs, Magdeburg”. But who was he? Was his name Wilhelm Krebs, as a source led me to suspect? Or was he the inspector Wilhelm Krebs, who published various essays in the Zeitschrift für Bauwesen? We don’t know. The Magdeburg City Archive has also been unable to find any information in its documents and old address books that matches an early photographer of locomotives. However, we know more about Werner Hubert. His collection was irretrievably destroyed in the Dresden firestorm, and he himself survived the war as a broken man. It is not least thanks to Carl Bellingrodt that large parts of his pictures could be reproduced and thus preserved for posterity. And of course, old postcards from him keep turning up. Easily recognizable by the WH on the back.

I was lucky that a map he wrote himself has now found its way into my collection. Which path this map might have taken? It dates from 23.12.1932 and is signed with Christmas greetings to the retired railway chief engineer.  E. Knoche. The Christmas wishes are followed by the sentence “Hopefully next year will bring the long-awaited improvement of the general situation”. Interesting, by the way, is Werner Hubert’s Leipzig return address. And the destination address in Magdeburg – the location of “Krebs”, which, by the way, actually photographed mainly locomotives of the Prussian administrative district of Magdeburg. The locomotive – one of the two-cylinder compound engines of the Prussian class G5.4 converted to superheated steam in the twenties of the last century – bears the number 54 908 in the picture. The date of recording is probably the year 1932 – because I just suspect quite humanly that Werner Hubert sent one of his latest pictures as a Christmas card.