In Germany, the Schienenbus was developed in the 1930s to fulfill the need for an inexpensive rail vehicle built to standard specifications on Germany's Reichsbahn (the predecessor to DB) to meet the demand for cost-effective services on light railways or Kleinbahnen, and the Wismar railbus were pioneers in those days.
A number of serious accidents in Germany in the late 1970s involving Schienenbus resulted in the development and specification of larger, more robustly designed diesel railcars.