Märkische Museums-Eisenbahn (Sauerländer Kleinbahn)

Updated: August 2026 – If you look at a track in the Sauerland and think it looks too narrow, you’re not mistaken. The Märkische Museums-Eisenbahn runs at Hüinghausen on a gauge of 1,000 millimetres – metre gauge, of the kind that once defined the light-railway network of this region. And it runs with steam, not only on special days.

Narrow-gauge steam belongs in the logbook

Locomotive, date and location logged in seconds – with only a handful of running days a year, that's your only chance at a clean record.

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Why the Sauerland built narrow gauge

Light railways weren’t built narrow-gauge out of nostalgia, but out of calculation. A metre-gauge track needs less earthmoving, manages with tighter curves and can be laid on a slope that a standard-gauge route would have needed cuttings and bridges for. In a rugged upland area like the Märkisches Sauerland, that was often the only way to build a railway at all.

The price was fixed from the start: no compatibility. Freight had to be transhipped, and vehicles from the standard-gauge network could never be taken over. When lorries and buses became capable in the 1950s, the light railway lost exactly the advantage that had justified it – and vanished almost entirely within a few decades.

What metre gauge means in practice

For you at the lineside, it’s mainly the fourth row that matters. A metre-gauge railway can’t borrow a guest locomotive from the standard-gauge network. What runs here has to come from its own stock or from another narrow-gauge railway. That makes a running day here more predictable in terms of rolling stock, but poorer in surprises.

What rolling stock you’ll see here

Narrow gauge has its own world of rolling stock. The steam locomotives are small, short-built machines from industrial and light-railway stock – often tank locomotives with no separate tender, because on tight routes every metre of length counts. Anyone looking for a standard-gauge comparison will find it in the local-railway designs of Class 98: the same job, on a different scale.

Among the diesel vehicles, technology from manufacturers that specialised in narrow gauge dominates. Machines such as the DIEMA DVL 150 and the Schöma CFL-200 stand for this class: compact, rugged, built for industrial and field railways. On the standard-gauge network, the equivalent role is filled by the V 60 family, just a size smaller.

There’s no permanently reliable public source for the society’s actual fleet: restorations take years, loans change, and what stands in the shed today may be dismantled tomorrow. Anyone wanting to note a number reads it off the vehicle itself.

Photographing a narrow-gauge steam railway

The combination of metre gauge and steam has a photographic quirk of its own: everything is smaller, but nothing is slower in how it plays out. The exhaust plume of a small locomotive in a narrow valley rises more vertically, lingers longer and fills the frame faster than you’d expect from a standard-gauge locomotive. That’s an advantage on gradients, and a problem when the wind is unfavourable.

A third point concerns the diagrams. On a short line, the same train runs several times on a running day, in both directions. That’s a rare opportunity: you can try out an idea for a shot, check the result, and correct it on the next run – something that never works on a main line with changing rolling stock. Plan the day this way and you’ll go home with three well-thought-out pictures instead of thirty similar ones.

The second difference is scale. A standard-gauge express train carries itself in a landscape; a short narrow-gauge train doesn’t. Frame it too small and it gets lost between the trees and the slope. Getting closer, shooting from a lower angle, or deliberately choosing a frame with the locomotive and one or two carriages works better here than the grand landscape shot. The technical basics are covered in the guide Photographing steam trains.

Keep narrow-gauge sightings clearly separated

With the Traintrack app you log exactly which railway, which gauge and which vehicle you actually saw.

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Who a visit is worthwhile for

Anyone wanting plenty of standard gauge on the same trip has a short journey: Hagen-Vorhalle sits on the edge of the Sauerland and delivers freight traffic, while Hamm (Westphalia) adds passenger services in quick succession. For a direct gauge comparison within one weekend, the equally metre-gauge Selfkantbahn in the west of the state is also worth considering.

Verdict

The Märkische Museums-Eisenbahn is not a big heritage railway, and it doesn’t try to be one. It keeps a gauge in operation that was once standard in the Sauerland and has now vanished almost everywhere else – with steam, on a short surviving stretch, with a workshop right next to it.

That very density is what makes the visit worthwhile. You don’t see many trains, but you do see how a train comes together: firing up, shunting, running, standing down. Anyone who knows the running day, arrives early and frames the short vehicle correctly comes away with shots that have become rare in the German railway scene.

An archive that keeps gauges apart

Metre gauge, standard gauge, field railway – kept clearly separate, every sighting stays unambiguous even years later.

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