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Armistice Day train

Image

‘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 declarations such as 'Ausflug nach Paris' ('Trip to Paris') and 'Auf Wiedersehen auf dem Boulevard' ('See you on the boulevard').

 
Credit

New Zealand Railway and Locomotive Society
Reference: R.J. Meyer Collection, A327-1/2

How to cite this page

Armistice Day train, URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/armistice-day-train, (Manatū Taonga — Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated