Luke the engine driver

When we were little, back in the mid-sixties, train drivers were still great pikes. They stood in the driver's cab at the front of the steaming locomotives as they trudged up the Rhine. They wore overalls, at least that's how we remember them. They smoked a pipe, could blow smoke rings into the air, spit a loop. And if they bent an iron bar, they bent it into a loop.

We knew all this about train drivers from Michael Ende's "Jim Button" books and from the black and white films of the Augsburger Puppenkiste. Of course, we had no idea that our heroes, who we let steam through our Märklin landscapes in the basement, looked a bit like Claus Weselsky. Because the Dresden-born train driver leader, who children today consider to be the only true train pilot due to a lack of other train driver role models, was just one year old when Lukas was born in Stuttgart.

Now one could well imagine Weselsky, the trained rail vehicle fitter, bending bulky railroad board members into loops with his left hand if necessary during negotiations and then triumphantly spitting a loop into the air. Apart from that, he might differ from Jim Button's best friend, the peaceful and courageous world traveler on Emma, the almost human steam locomotive, not only in that he is a little taller, doesn't wear a golden ring in his left earlobe and doesn't have eyes as blue as the sky over Lummerland in fair weather.

The whole locomotive driver romanticism is long gone anyway. No ICE driver wears blue overalls any more, and it is as unlikely that someone will turn their ICE into an amphibious vehicle overnight, as Lukas did, as it is that a Tesla owner will try out the electric motors on their electric car. Nor can it be said that Lummerland, the island with two mountains and five tunnels, which we always liked to confuse with Germany as children, is full of train tracks. What makes the first Ende book particularly controversial and topical is, of course, King Alfonso the Quarter Twelfth, who, after the arrival of Jim, the black baby, decides in the best AfD manner out of fear of overpopulation on his island that Lummerland is too crowded and the Emma locomotive must be abolished. That's where it all starts.

Everything turns out well in the end. Lummerland becomes a kingdom that offers asylum to all needy children in the world. And the Wild 13, this pirate gang, which - at least in the eyes of Claus Weselsky - is not dissimilar to the railroad board, turns out to be an assembly of rude but essentially good-hearted guys. That gives us hope for the coming wage disputes.

All that nice locomotive driver romanticism is long gone anyway