Armistice Day train

‘The end of the German sausage’. Gore railway workers celebrated Armistice Day in November 1918 by decorating locomotive F 78 and a wagon with cabbage trees, flags, imitation sausages and a blunt message: ‘To “Hell” with the Kaiser’.

The words 'To Paris 1914 – To Hell 1918' recall the chalked messages scrawled on troop trains carrying soldiers to the European front lines in August 1914; some German trains carried bold declarations like 'Ausflug nach Paris' ('Trip to Paris') and 'Auf Wiedersehen auf dem Boulevard' ('See you on the boulevard').