They gained cult status among railway enthusiasts but became an early victim of electrification just ten years later: the first diesel multiple units built for the Deutsche Bundesbahn after 1945, the VT 08 for long-distance services and the VT 12 for regional traffic. The timeline spans almost forty years from the start of development to their retirement: after serving in high-quality express train services and temporarily in TEE services as well as in long-distance regional traffic, they gradually moved to the provinces of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein after just a few years. The VT 08 were also the first German vehicles after the break of 1945 to travel again to Western countries such as Paris, Amsterdam, Ostend, or Zurich. The new EK series book describes the technical development of the multiple units from 1948 and does not forget the test vehicles VT 20 and the experiments.