Hanomag

The history of Hanomag

Hanomag built 10,764 steam locomotives before it built a tractor, and sold the tractor business off in pieces at the end.

The company was founded on 6 June 1835 by Georg Egestorff at Hannover-Linden. Trading as the Eisen-Giesserey und Maschinenfabrik Georg Egestorff it was delivering steam locomotives from 1846 — the first on 15 June that year — which made it one of the earliest locomotive works in Germany. Bethel Strousberg held the works for three years from 1868, and in 1871 it became a joint-stock company as HANOMAG Hannoversche Maschinenbau AG vormals Georg Egestorff. The Hannover-Linden plant was one of the most important locomotive factories in the country, and it built nothing but steam into the 1920s — Hanomag never took up motor locomotives at all. Orders fell away at the end of that decade, the last locomotive left the works on 31 July 1931, and the total from 1846 stood at 10,764.

Everything else grew up alongside it. Lorries from 1905, which ran until 1977 and from 1968 as Hanomag-Henschel with Daimler-Benz holding 51%. Motor ploughs from 1912, built on the Wendeler-Dohrn system and sold through a subsidiary, with benzol engines of up to 80 hp; the 80 hp WD plough sold widely at home and abroad and a 35 hp type joined it later, but a carried plough only ploughs, and the versatile tractor eventually made it redundant on smaller holdings. Crawlers from 1919 — the Z25, finally 28 hp, and the 50 hp Z50 — suited forestry, intensive beet growing and mountain country, which is to say they were a special case rather than the machine that could spread across all of farming.

That machine arrived in 1924: the WD 26, Hanomag's first tractor in the modern sense, with a benzol engine. It sold well in Germany and abroad, and part of the appeal was that swapping the gripping steel wheels for rubber tyres turned it into road transport. The first diesel, the RD 36, came in 1931, and from 1937 the RL 20 farmer's tractor was put together for smallholdings out of existing car components.

After the war Hanomag built a modular range. From 1950 came tractors sharing 2-, 3- and 4-cylinder engines, shown as the R series at the DLG exhibition in Hamburg in 1951, spanning 16 to 55 hp and extended through the 1960s. Then came the mistake. The R 12 of 1953 became the basis of the C types with two-stroke diesels, engines the company had high hopes for and which turned out to be neither mature nor durable. Sales rose at first and then collapsed from 1955 as the technical problems multiplied, which put Hanomag in serious trouble and forced it back to four-strokes. The reworked four-stroke R series came to the fore again from 1960, with features such as Pilot automatic plough-depth control, while the two-strokes ran on in parallel until 1962. The R series was the real backbone of the business and the foundation of its good name; the two-strokes were not.

Overseas production ran at Rosario in Argentina from 1954, based on the R45 with the four-cylinder four-stroke D57 diesel, and continued until the works was sold to Massey Ferguson in 1970. At home, between 1952 and 1960, the Combitrac programme let a buyer order matching implements with the tractor across every range — machinery from Hanomag's own works at Hannover and Essen, filled out with other makers' products.

The last decade was a series of attempts. A cooperation with Bautz from 1961 lasted only to 1963, when Bautz gave up tractors altogether. Between 1960 and 1962 the range was cut back and renamed, producing four base types — Greif, Granit, Brillant and Robust — each with a three-figure number indicating roughly the power and the cylinder count together. From 1962 the programme was thinner still: Perfekt 300 and 400, Granit 500, Brillant 600 and the R 460, with the engines converted to the swirl-chamber process for more power and slightly less fuel. The two Perfekts were implement carriers replacing the troubled two-strokes, fitted from 1963 with a four-cylinder Borgward diesel bought out of Borgward's bankruptcy and developed further. Hanomag sat between sixth and eighth in the German registration statistics, nowhere near what its parent Rheinstahl wanted. The industrial designer Louis L. Lepoix restyled the Perfekt 300 and 400 in 1964, which ended years of rounded shapes in favour of clear angular ones, and the Robust 800 took the largest engine Hanomag ever put in a series wheeled tractor — a 6.8 litre unit out of its construction machinery programme. The Granit 500/1 of 1966 was almost wholly new apart from the engine, with a nine-forward, three-reverse range-change gearbox.

In 1967, under the slogan Kraftvoller denn je — more powerful than ever — Hanomag launched completely new heavy models, the Brillant 600 and 700 and the Robust 900, on the back of nearly 100 million marks invested since 1965 in a closed programme with new engines and new gearboxes, styled again by Lepoix. They were handsome and they did not succeed.

The dismantling followed in order. The lorry division went to Daimler-Benz in 1969. In 1970 Rheinstahl decided to let tractor production run out, sold the Argentine works at Rosario to Massey Ferguson and then the Essen farm machinery plant. From 1971 the remaining ordered tractors were cleared out and the dealer network and parts supply were handed to Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz. In 1972 the engine production line, modernised only five years earlier, was sold to Volvo.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: Hanomag, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.