4-piece TOUROPA Set 2 DB Ep.IIIb 3x Bcm53/WRtüm 51-6

3x Bcm 53 (standard with apron) 1x WRtüm 51/60 dining car red Increasing competition from airplanes and road traffic forced the long-established travel companies such as Touropa and Scharnow to improve their services as early as the end of the 1950s. The DB, as the owner of the couchette cars, took the first step at the insistence of Touropa and installed four preferential compartments in couchette cars of the delivery years 1953 and 1954. In 1963, the first UIC-X couchette cars of the type Bc4üm-62 (later Bcm 243) were put on the rails. The new couchette cars had only 10 compartments and a page compartment. From 1967 onwards, new 27.5 m long coaches with preferential compartments (Bctm 256) were added and for the last time the company names of the major tour operators were emblazoned on these coaches. 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 holiday trains continued to run until well into the eighties with coaches of the Bcm 246 and Bctm 257 types, some of which had been modernised again.