Description
Scharnow Reisen Set 1 consisting of: 2x couchette car Bcm54 without apron, 1x couchette car Bcm53/60 with preferred compartment and apron and 1x couchette car Bcm54/60 with preferred compartment without apron. The cars have interior lighting and one car has marker lights.
Increasing competition from air and road transport forced the long-established travel companies such as Touropa and Scharnow to improve their services as early as the end of the 1950s. The first step was taken by DB, as the owner of the couchette coaches, at Touropa’s insistence, and it installed four preferential compartments in each of the couchette coaches delivered in 1953 and 1954. In 1963, the first UIC-X couchette coaches of type Bc4üm-62 (later Bcm 243) came onto the rails. The new couchette coaches now only had 10 compartments and a bellboy compartment.
From 1967, new 27.5 m long coaches with preferential compartments (Bctm 256) were added and the company names of the major tour operators were emblazoned on these coaches for the last time. After the merger of various travel companies to form TUI (Touristik Union International) in 1969, the lettering disappeared at the beginning of the seventies. Some vacation trains continued to run well into the eighties with partially modernized coaches of types Bcm 246 and Bctm 257.