reopened, therefore, in 1949. The operator of the Brocken Railway until 5 August 1948 was the Nordhausen-Wernigerode Railway Company (NWE), after which it belonged from the Association of Publicly Owned Companies (VVB), part of Saxony-Anhalt's transport services, and, from 11 April 1949 to the Deutsche Reichsbahn in East Germany. Only after the German winter sports championships in 1950, which took place in Schierke, did winter trains run up to the Brocken summit. A railway station at Eckerloch was also built for the championships which was closed again after they had ended. The location of the former sidings at Eckerloch station can still be easily seen. Goods trains continued to work the Brocken Railway right up to 1987, although since the construction of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 the Brocken and its station had been part of the out-of-bounds area and thus not accessible to the public. Up to that time the trains transported coal, oil and building materials up the mountain for the East German Border Troops and Soviet soldiers who were stationed there. Passengers services on the Brocken Railway continued to run from Drei Annen Hohne to Schierke; usually only two pairs of passenger train pairs ran each day; however they could be used with only a special pass, because Schierke lay in the border zone with West Germany. After German reunification the continued operation of the Brocken Railway was initially called into question, however united efforts by railway enthusiasts and politicians under the overall control of the then state Minister for the Economy, Horst Rehberger, helped to give the Brocken Railway a second chance. The German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr) was also involved, because the Brocken Railway was needed to haul away the obsolete, military facilities on the Brocken. On 15 September 1991, after being renovated, the Brocken Railway was ceremoniously opened to the public with two steam-hauled trains. The trains were headed by locomotive no. 99 5903, a Mallet locomotive, which had been procured by the NWE in 1897/98, and locomotive no. 99 6001, a prototype developed in 1939 by the firm of Krupp. Since the privatisation of the narrow gauge lines in the Harz in 1993 the Brocken Railway has been operated by the Harz Narrow Gauges Railways (HSB). The steam trains on the Brocken Railway have become popular with thousands of tourists every year, offering convenient access to the top of the Brocken. Current