Class E 44

Updated: August 2026 – A classic-era electric locomotive with no rods running along its sides: what sounds self-evident today was a break with previous construction for the Class E 44. Four driven axles in two bogies, no jackshaft drive, no carrying axles – this page shows you why that matters and how to identify the machine reliably.

What is Class E 44?

The E 44 is a universal electric locomotive, built from 1933 for the German railway electrification system with 15 kV and 16.7 Hz. It has a Bo’Bo’ wheel arrangement – four driven axles, spread across two bogies – reaches 90 km/h and was used ahead of both passenger and freight trains. At Deutsche Bundesbahn it later ran as Class 144, at Deutsche Reichsbahn as Class 244.

Its significance lies in the drive. Instead of a central motor with a jackshaft and coupling rods, each axle on the E 44 is driven individually via a nose-suspended motor. That did away with the externally visible rods and the carrying axles that had been needed for guidance – a design that took hold and has remained standard to this day. The comparison with the rod-driven Class E 32 makes this difference visible at a glance.

Identification: the absence of rods is the feature

With classic-era electric locomotives, identification runs via the running gear. With the E 44, it’s precisely what is not there that decides it.

The general order of steps in identification is explained in the guide to identifying locomotive classes. How to read the vehicle number and what its first digits say about the vehicle type is covered in the article on the UIC number and its check digit.

Classification: what makes a universal locomotive

The E 44 wasn’t built for a single train category, but for general operation. This design explains power, speed and body shape better than any single figure.

Design	Universal locomotive like the E 44	Express locomotive	Freight locomotive
Maximum speed	medium	high	low to medium
Starting tractive effort	good	medium	very high
Axles	four, all driven	four to six	six or more
Typical train	mixed, varying	passenger trains	heavy freight trains
Operational advantage	flexible use	specialised	specialised

The heavy counterpart of the same era is the Class E 94 – a freight locomotive with significantly more axles and a completely different usage profile. Within the E 44 family itself there were also sub-variants; one of them can be found as the Class E 44 W.

Where and how you’ll encounter an E 44

There are no scheduled workings left. Surviving machines belong to museums, societies and collections. They are shown at vehicle displays and exhibitions, and driven at individual special trips – and only where overhead line is present. Classic-era electric locomotives stand side by side at the Süddeutsches Eisenbahnmuseum Heilbronn in a breadth that scheduled service never showed. A similarly large collection in a fully preserved locomotive depot can be found at the Eisenbahnmuseum Bochum-Dahlhausen. In the south there’s also Bahnpark Augsburg, whose roundhouse and turntable still stand in their original arrangement.

Dates and travel routes can be found via the sources described in the heritage railway guide and in the article on finding special trains and special trips.

Why individual axle drive changed everything

You can pin down the significance of the E 44 on a single question: where do you put the motor? On early electric locomotives it sat inside the body, high above the axles, and had to bring its power down via a jackshaft and rods. This construction was heavy, maintenance-intensive and limited speed, because the moving masses of the rods weighed more heavily with every revolution.

Individual axle drive turns that around. Each wheelset gets its own motor, directly in the bogie. That does away with the jackshaft, the rods and the carrying axles that had previously been needed for guidance. The vehicle becomes shorter, lighter and considerably less complicated in power transmission – and all axles can be driven, which makes the entire vehicle weight usable as adhesion weight.

For observers, this is the most useful dividing line in the history of the German electric locomotive. Anything with rods belongs to the early phase, anything without rods to the period after. There’s no in-between stage to painstakingly place: either the rods are there or they aren’t, and you can see that from two hundred metres away.

What came after was refinement: better motors, different suspension, later three-phase technology and electronic control. The basic arrangement of two bogies with individually driven axles, on the other hand, has stayed – it’s found in practically every four-axle electric locomotive today.

Common mix-ups and how to rule them out

Verdict

Class E 44 is the locomotive on which you can pin down the turning point in German electric locomotive construction: it replaced the jackshaft and rods with individual axle drive and did without carrying axles. That’s exactly why it’s easy to identify – you look for rods and find none. You’ll only encounter it today as a museum vehicle, mostly standing, rarely running, always dependent on a date.