Foreign News: Oskar’s Special

Express train D-961 slid out of Salzburg at 9:53 p.m. bound for Munich. It was 13 minutes late—not too bad for the holiday season and a Saturday night. But up in the electric locomotive, Engineer Oskar Sauerbrey gave it a lot of thought. He throttled her up. “I think we are going too fast,” yelled Fireman Karl Rupp. Engineer Oskar simply opened the throttle some more—to 60 m.p.h. (the permitted limit), to 70, 80, 84. Back in the diner, cups and saucers crashed from cupboards, and in the compartments, people locked arms to keep from smashing against the walls. Women fainted in the aisles. A doctor was knocked unconscious by a tumbling suitcase as he treated his sixth patient.

Up steep inclines, around mountain curves at 75 m.p.h., D-961, spitting sparks and smoke from the wheels, zipped along until at last, 39 miles out of Salzburg, a 21-year-old diner steward took matters into his own hands, pulled the emergency brake. As the train screeched to a halt at Prien, Stationmaster Johann Birner, roused by frantic phone calls from down the line, said to Oskar: “LokomotivfÜhrer, I think you are drunk.”

The stationmaster was so right. Last week, before a Bavarian judge, Oskar and his fireman admitted that before boarding D-961 they had each downed five pints of strong Austrian beer and three Stamperln of liqueur. When the judge asked how big a Stamperl is, Oskar sheepishly pulled a liqueur glass from his pocket. For their wild night, the injuries to eleven of the 720 passengers, and the damages to six railway cars, the judge gave Oskar 18 months in prison and his fireman a year.