staff of 5,000 operated this strange railway, which ran through the scorched remains of Dresden as if through a ghostly dreamland. The last train ran in 1958, the official end of rubble clearance in Dresden. Even by then, however, by no means all areas of the city had been cleared. Even though, by as early as 1946, broad swathes of the city centre had been swept so clean that the author Erich Kästner described how he could walk for three quarters of an hour without passing a single house,
