Badge of honor for 25 years of service of the employees of the railway company Lenz & Co. GmbH. Material silver. Silver content mark “800” on the back. Makers mark from Johann Wagner and son in Berlin. Identical to the Prussian state railway badge except the crown.

Lenz & Co. GmbH was a German railway construction and operating company, founded in 1892 and liquidated in 1970. The history of the Lenz Group began at the end of the 19th century, when the network of main railway lines in the German Reich was completed and most of the branch lines were already in operation. However, at that time there were still many regions - especially in agriculturally structured areas - without railway connections. Above all, the largest German state, the Kingdom of Prussia, did not see itself in a position to fulfill all the legitimate wishes of the affected population by having the Prussian State Railway itself act as builder and operator. The Prussian government therefore pursued the plan to have the local railways built and operated in a simplified manner by private companies in which the state, the provinces, the districts and cities, as well as local interested parties from the economy could participate. For this purpose, the Prussian Kleinbahngesetz was created, which was promulgated on July 28, 1892. In a good two decades, this law led to the construction of more than 12,000 km of secondary and small railways in the Kingdom of Prussia. The railway network was thereby compressed from 6.99 km to 13.7 km per 100 km²; so it had almost doubled. The share of non-state railways in the total route network in Prussia rose again from 6% in 1892 to 26% in 1914. Lenz & Co. GmbH was involved in these construction projects with around 100 railways to a third. The founders of this company had apparently recognized the trend in good time and fully exploited the opportunities offered by the new law. (From Wikipedia)