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Thursday, January 19, 2023

Choo-choo shower


This was one of the very first military photos I collected, and it depicts an experimental 
German rail car refitted to be a portable shower.  That was fine as long the the tracks went 
where the unbathed soldiers were.  I have no idea if the concept panned out or not.

 

6 comments:

  1. I'm guessing this dates from the First World War. It's a great idea, really.

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  2. To help unfamiliar out with the idiosyncrasies of British colloquial English, an "anorak" is someone who is a "studious or obsessive person with unfashionable and largely solitary interests" and was coined in the '60s when anoraks became unaccountably fashionable for such types, train spotters being the epitome of the phenomenon. The Germans being so practical when it came to showers, I thought I would look this up because if there were any records, you can bet your bottom Reichmark a train spotter would have found them. I have found a reference to bathroom cars in Pullman trains so the Duke and Duchess of Windsor could roll up squeaky clean when visiting Aunt Bessie in Baltimore - but apart from that, zilch. We can therefore safely assume that the concept didn't pan out...

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    Replies
    1. I don't know about the military use, but railroad work trains had shower cars, back before they put bathroom facilities in the living cars. The Santa Fe cars looked somewhat like this.
      --Tom

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    2. It would make sense for work trains to have showers.

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