Tak igen til alle, der har givet input. Jeg har skrevet således til Robert Forsythe, som satte mig i gang med at søge oplysninger:

"Dear Robert,

I put a query on Peter Sabroe Eilertsen (PSE) on a Danish railway forum discussion page and put a query through to an expert on industrial locomotives and have got some very interesting information.

PSE was born in 1923 and died in 1997, pensioned from the Danish Post Office where he ended as postmaster in a former station town in Northern Jylland, called Aabybro. The town boasted a junction between the Frederikshavn - Fjerritslev Railway and Hjørring-Løkken-Aabybro Railway. The former closed in 1969 after about 75 years, the latter in 1963 after fifty years of existence.

In 1969 just over 2,100 souls lived in Aabybro. Today there are over 6,000 because of the proximity to Aalborg, Denmark's fourth largest city.

The postmaster had the same status in a town as the local stationmaster, and was the chief of the Post Office in the town and often a number of sub-POs, called brevsamlingssteder (letter collecting points in direct translation), as well as all staff, including the postmen.

He was stationed in Svendborg, Kalundborg and Fredericia before going north to Aabybro. This was quite normal for employees at the state railway, DSB, and the Post Office, and the permanent staff in the armed forces as well. The permanent staff was employed as civil servants and had the whole of Denmark as their "office", but with a pension scheme on top of the state pension which made up for the rather low salaries.

During my time as a civil servant things had changed and I was taken in under a contract between my trade union (a number of unions in fact, under an umbrella organisation), but still with a generous pension system to which I contributed five per cent of my gross income, and my employer ten per cent, in Denmark always placed at arm's length from the employer so that a sudden insolvency does not rip the pension off employees.

This scheme has been good enough to secure me an income almost identical to the one I had while working. Not bad.

That was a digression, however.

While at Fredericia Eilertsen was station on the travelling post offices going out from Fredericia which has always been the hub for traffic between Jylland and the islands in east Denmark, including Copenhagen, as well as North-South and East-West crossroads in Jylland so Fredericia was, and remains, one of the most important rail junctions on the Danish rail network. He had his interest in locomotives and took his camera with him while on duty. When he saw something to interest him, he shot it!

A high-ranking railway or postal servant was expected to communicate with the outside world as well as with the Danish organisation so the knowledge of languages was expected, if not always used.

His great archives (I am told that his latest listing of German locos took up seventy (70) binders) have been given to the Technical Museum of Denmark, located here in Helsingør. Unfortunately there has been a lack of resources (economical as well as physical) at that museum to do much more than storing the archives, of which a good deal should be in English. One informant describes the archive taking up the space of a closed freight wagon. A traditional closed Danish freight wagon is about twice the size on average compared to a traditional British freight wagon so it is no mean task to get the archives formally enrolled.

All for now, I hope this sheds a little light on what seems to have been a fascinating person.

Regards

Anders"