Adler

Adler (German: Eagle) was a 2-2-2 steam locomotive built by Robert Stephenson & Co of Newcastle in 1835 and supplied to the Bayerische Ludwigsbahn — the 6-kilometre line between Nuremberg and Fürth that was Germany's first steam-hauled public railway. On 7 December 1835, Adler hauled the inaugural train along the line, marking the beginning of the railway age in Germany.

Adler was a standard example of Stephenson's Patentee-type 2-2-2, a design that Robert Stephenson had developed in the early 1830s and which became the dominant British express locomotive pattern of the decade. The type featured a single pair of large driving wheels — in Adler's case 4 ft 6 in in diameter — flanked by smaller carrying wheels front and rear, inside cylinders at the smokebox end, and the characteristic Stephenson sandwich frames of laminated timber between iron plates. The locomotive was dispatched to Germany in component form and assembled at Nuremberg under the supervision of Stephenson's engineman William Wilson, who remained in Germany as the Ludwigsbahn's first locomotive driver.

Adler worked the Nuremberg–Fürth line for over two decades before being withdrawn in 1857 and scrapped. The original components were dispersed and nothing survives. For the centenary of German railways in 1935, the Deutsche Reichsbahn commissioned a fully working replica, built using the original Stephenson works drawings that had been preserved at Newcastle. The 1935 replica suffered serious fire damage when the Nuremberg locomotive roundhouse burned in October 2005, but was repaired and returned to working order. It remains at the DB Museum in Nuremberg, where it is occasionally steamed for special events.