Riding high in Germany on the world's oldest suspended railway

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/jun/09/riding-high-in-germany-on-the-worlds-oldest-suspended-railway

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

195 108 1 year ago

tormeh• 1 year ago

This does seem like a superior way to build elevated rail. Less noise in particular, as turning doesn't induce slippage like on a normal train. Wonder why it's so rare.

highcountess• 1 year ago

I think the lock-in is the biggest issue. If you have a hanging rail system, you can't just transition off the hanging rail to bottom rail when no longer needed like you could with elevated bottom rail.

bombcar3• 1 year ago

This one has the advantage of always being over the river, but you could (at much increased weight) put wheels on both the top and bottom of the carriage and have a transition point.

Expensive and impractical, but could be fun at a theme park.

frosted-flakes• 1 year ago

Lots of unnecessary complexity. In this case it makes sense because the majority of the line is directly over a river due to space constraints, but it's a lot simpler to build a concrete viaduct and run normal trains ovwr it. This also allows the train to transition to run underground or at-grade.

Gigachad• 1 year ago

Not an engineer, but just looking at the photos, this takes an enormous amount of steel. While most elevated rail is just a concrete bridge with a small amount of structural steel.

Most rails lines continue far enough to leave dense urban areas where this makes sense so they have to transition between elevated and ground level tracks which this can't do.

cenamus• 1 year ago

Turning also doesn't involve slippage in trains. Many locomotives already have independently turning wheels, and the solid axles of train carts can also turn just fine (as explained in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_-UJNETSlg for example)

Bigpet• 1 year ago

The solid axle turning without slippage from that video works for regular inter-city rail. I think it doesn't work for rails with the tighter turning radii often required of inner city trams and similar rail transport.

mbajkowski• 1 year ago

Having lived there for several years I remember these to be quite loud. Maybe because the way they hang allows them to sway left to right a bit, and causes the metal wheels to make contact with the track at various angles. Quiet they were not, but fun to ride for sure, and a lot more punctual than busses.

vegabook• 1 year ago

Bit of an HDR vibe going on in the photos.

somat• 1 year ago

Dangle-trains are one of those things that appeal to me for unknown reasons, they just look so cool. But I am unable to really quantify the appeal, so here is my attempt.

Advantages:

keeps your electrical plant out of the weather

allows the track to be out of the road while allowing street level access to train. This one is a bit iffy as the dangle train will usually be put above street traffic.

Disadvantages:

look at how much steel it takes to make that box beam.

Every thing is in tension, leading to complicated structure to contain it, joints can be much simpler in compression.

Any how as a dangle-train connoisseur I leave you with two additional videos.

A dangle train in japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGLrP5eawdY

The Tim Traveler (perhaps the best all around esoteric travel channel) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kwpj1UOrhs

thoeri2o34j234• 1 year ago

+1 for the Shonan-Monorail.

For those travelling to Tokyo, go to Kamakura, take the famous Enoden to Enoshima, then take Shonan-Monorail to Ofuna and return to Tokyo.

tecleandor• 1 year ago

Oh! Last time I went to Kamakura was in 2006 and I didn't visit Enoshima nor Ofuna. I'm going to Tokyo this next month again. Are those visits worthy?

Aeolun5• 1 year ago

Japan has a lot more of these, though normally the tracks are below the wagons, which is presumably more efficient.

decimalenough3• 1 year ago

Japan has exactly two (Chiba & Shonan). But that's still a lot by world standards, since there's less than 10 total in existence.

decimalenough3• 1 year ago

The reason this was used in Wuppertal is that because the town is a steep valley with a river in the middle, so the best/only place to hang the track was over the river.

Wikipedia has the (not very long) full list of every "dangle-train" ever built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_railway

aidenn0• 1 year ago

And all currently operating trains are in one of China, Germany, Japan.

lmm3• 1 year ago

Monorails are somewhat cheaper than elevated trains (if you don't have extreme disabled-evacuation laws) but more expensive than a conventional train at ground level, and junctions are a nightmare. So they only work where you have a single isolated line and would need to elevate most of the track anyway (and suspended rather than straddle-beam improves cornering performance but at a cost, so is only worth it if your route has many sharp corners as well).

For Wuppertal, where the town is pretty linear along a river valley, it works. (Even then, a straddle-beam monorail would probably be more cost-efficient if you were starting from scratch). For most places it doesn't.

bluGill4• 1 year ago

Monorail needs bigger tunnels than conventional rail so if you need underground sections - which most systems need - they are more expensive.

even if you are only need a single isolated elevated line though monorail still loses just because there is no standard: when you need spare parts in 20 years it is questinable if you can get them.

itsmartapuntocm• 1 year ago

Bangkok changed the plans of its two most recent transit lines (Yellow and Pink) from standard rail to monorail for the cost savings - since they're completely elevated. I guess they solved the evacuation issue by making the space between the two rails a solid platform.

madaxe_again• 1 year ago

If you like The Tim Traveler you’ll probably also like “What On Earth is This?”, very much the same vein, no overlap in what they’ve covered. His latest video is on a 1960’s underwater cable car in France.

https://youtube.com/@whatonearthisthisthing?si=OCSx2leuGaDSG...

Stratoscope• 1 year ago

Here is a wonderful video, riding the Wuppertal Schwebebahn in 1902 and 2015 side by side:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc

As noted in the description, the 1902 video plays in real time, and the 2015 video has some cuts and framerate adjustments to keep them in sync.

Aeolun5• 1 year ago

This is fantastic! Though my main takeaway is that we’ve seemingly forgotten how to make our cities aesthetically pleasing.

appointment• 1 year ago

Here's the original 1902 footage as digitized by MoMA, without AI bullshit smeared over it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU

Jean-Philipe• 1 year ago

Thank you! I keep stumbling upon interesting historical footage on Youtube, only to find that it's been ruined by janky AI. I do think there's a place for AI and video restauration, but colors and 4k, with soundscape, really?

frereubu5• 1 year ago

Thanks for this. There's so much more detail here.

irjustin• 1 year ago

Oh man I love the aesthetics of the 1902 trains, gorgeous.

amai2• 1 year ago

Cities were so beautiful before we destroyed them with all the streets for cars. Also modern buildings look really ugly. We need more ornaments in architecture.

MagnumOpus• 1 year ago

Here it is more a case of “cities were so beautiful before we destroyed them with all the firebombing by the Royal Air Force”…

Half of Wuppertal’s buildings were destroyed by the end of WW2. Some cities had the leeway to rebuild historical ornamented buildings, many others built as cheaply and quickly as possible because it was more important to create more shelter rather than prettier housing.

Edit: Though I very much agree on the ugliness of the excessive street furniture and car parking space!

mschuster91• 1 year ago

Also modern buildings look really ugly. We need more ornaments in architecture.

Agree but who the fuck is gonna pay for it? Urban housing is already under massive price competition.

mantas• 1 year ago

Horse poop wasn't exactly great too.

frereubu5• 1 year ago

Agree about the destruction for cars. "Modern buildings look really ugly" is far too broad a statement though. Apart from it being entirely subjective - there are lots of modern buildings that I love - your statement just sounds like "ugly buildings are ugly" and needs unpacking because I presume you don't mean "every single building built after 19XX is ugly".

wffurr• 1 year ago

RIP all those street trees too.

locallost• 1 year ago

You can make them "beautiful" (as in the eye of the beholder), but it will cost you.

A lot of old buildings are beautiful because the people making them beautiful were piss poor and paid accordingly.

sandworm101• 1 year ago

Ya, they were great before all those annoying people moved in and made everything so crowded. Everything looks better when there are open fields every other block.

Sharlin2• 1 year ago

It's not really about people. What made places crowded was cars, which take a vast amount of extra space per person transported, and continue to take that space even when empty.

Sharlin2• 1 year ago

Really brings it home how much common space we gave away to cars.

spankibalt2• 1 year ago

Riding high, high up in ze sky.

Ja, ja, all fun and games... until your danglies drop. :( [1]

1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Wuppertal_Schwebebahn_acc...]

8bitsrule• 1 year ago

Five human dead in 125 years is a record to envy for most transit systems. (Light rail likes to run into pedestrians, almost as much as buses.) And it was a maintenance failure, not an operator or structural one.

Not to count the baby elephant that fell out of one car back in 1950.

Wuppertal is a wonderful ride for many thousands daily, millions for decades, and is a wonderful model of visual, sane, safe engineered public transport.

spankibalt2• 1 year ago

Not to count the baby elephant that fell out of one car back in 1950.

Heavens to Betsy! And the elephant lived... till 1989! :)

Wuppertal is a wonderful ride for many thousands daily, millions for decades, and is a wonderful model of visual, sane, safe engineered public transport.

Is ja jut, ich kauf' den Tagespass.

Aeolun5• 1 year ago

It was not the railway’s fault. As always in these cases, it was the squishy humans making the mistakes.

Seriously, who works on a railway until 6 in the morning? That’s like deploying on a Friday afternoon at 16:50…

defrost6• 1 year ago

Seriously, who works on a railway until 6 in the morning?

A great many rail crews the world over .. night time being the best time for rolling maintainance and bed upgrades on largely daytime passenger lines.

The question that was asked during the investigation was more along the lines of "who does major work every night on rail lines and doesn't integrate end of shift safety checks (looking for still in place gear, unfinished work, etc)" ?

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

Pretty much all major railway maintenance (at least for major lines which can't reasonably be closed) is done overnight, to avoid closing the railway during operating hours.

sva_• 1 year ago

When I first saw this thing while riding my bike by that river, it seemed like the most grotesque industrial thing you could ruin a nice river with.

But I know, people on here like trains (lol), so I'll probably get down voted for stating my opinion.

Gare• 1 year ago

You might consider it an eyesore, but the river is hardly ruined by it.

bombcar3• 1 year ago

There are tons of public projects that faced fierce opposition because of the ugliness, that would now face fierce defense because of the heritage.

And it's a better fate for the river than the concrete tubes many get stuck in.

https://www.hiddenhydrology.org/lost-creeks-of-the-bay-area-...

eternauta3k• 1 year ago

You can have both. Enjoy the weird-looking train when you're in Wuppertal, then be thankful that you have an awesome river back home like in Munich.

pomian• 1 year ago

Wasn't there a hanging tram under the train going over the Berlin wall? (For workers at Checkpoint Charlie i believe.)

brazzy• 1 year ago

You may be thinking of the M-Bahn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Bahn - though fits almost none of the details:)

Findecanor• 1 year ago

I will never forget when I saw this the first time.

I woke up early in the morning on a sleeper train to Düsseldorf. The train had stopped so I looked out the window: at A-frames straddling a river. My first thought was: "That's a weird-looking roller coaster".

TimByte2• 1 year ago

Half-asleep, expecting normal train scenery, and then bam: suspended train casually gliding over a river

vintermann• 1 year ago

I first saw it in a comic book. Roger Leloup, who drew most of the fancy planes and cars in Tintin, had his own series called Yoko Tsuno, and he used the Wuppertal suspended rail for a minor plot point in one album ("Odin's fire"). In order to have an excuse to draw it, most likely. His love for drawing cool technology shines through.

TimByte2• 1 year ago

It's wild that something built in 1901 is still not just operational but central to a city's transit system

Xylakant• 1 year ago

That’s much more common than one would think. The London tube began operation 160 years ago. The U1 line in Berlin was constructed between 1902 and 1926. The central railway lines are substantially older. The Paris metro began operation in summer 1900.

Bridges in old cities are very often much older than a century.

The ship lift in Niederfinow that connects the Oder-Havel Canal to the Oder river went into operation in 1936 - the canal that it serves dates back to 1743. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiffshebewerk_Niederfinow

The Hoover hydroelectric dam is now 90 years old.

codethief4• 1 year ago

The U1 line in Berlin was constructed between 1902 and 1926.

There's also the S1 line, large parts of which date back to 1874[0] or even 1838[1], depending on how you count: The train back in 1838 established most of the path today's S1 takes through southwestern Berlin. The S1 runs on a second pair of rails, constructed in 1874, that run in parallel to the 1838 line and diverge from it near the city border. The old 1838 line is set to be rebuilt by 2038.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Railway

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin%E2%80%93Magdeburg_rai...

arethuza• 1 year ago

A lot of the rail infrastructure in the UK is older than that - e.g. I use the Forth Bridge quite a lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

I mean, you could say this of many if not most cities, I would think, for at least some part of the transport system. I can see elements of this from my office window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Kingstown_Railway - it's almost 200 years old. Still carrying a train every few minutes at peak times.

(Obviously a bit of a railway of Theseus at this point, in that besides some of the bridges there's ~no part of it which is literally from 1832.)

This thing is kind of weird in that it's apparently basically been the same route since completion (most old railways ultimately become part of larger systems), but there are other examples; I'm fairly sure that the Glasgow Subway route is ~exactly what it was in 1896 today, say.

pfdietz2• 1 year ago

Wasn't this substantially reconstructed after WW2? This whole area was bombed and then fought through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wuppertal_in_World_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr_pocket

amelius2• 1 year ago

Casts a shadow on the city. Not the perfect solution, if you ask me.

johnwalkr• 1 year ago

The small width and therefore small shadow and unobstruction of views of this type of train system is one of its main benefits. It’s less than a monorail and much less than a conventional above-grade system.

amelius2• 1 year ago

Take that header picture and imagine that street without the train, rail, support structures, and shadows. Much nicer if you ask me.

wpm• 1 year ago

So what? And for how long?

kccqzy• 1 year ago

What's wrong with shadows? Some people like shadows and others like sunlight. As long as there aren't shadows on every street you can always choose the streets you want to walk in.

xg152• 1 year ago

As workers flooded to the growing cities of Barmen and Elberfeld – which merged in 1929 and were renamed Wuppertal in 1930 – the authorities realised a public transport system was needed. Other cities were going underground, but Wuppertal’s rocky soil and narrow, steep valley made any sort of U-Bahn impossible, forcing the Schwebebahn’s inventor, Eugen Langen, to look up instead.

Was a bit confused at this paragraph, as to why it would suddenly date the inception of the Schwebebahn in the 1930s when the same article began with the maiden voyage in 1901.

So to clarify this: The Schwebebahn really is older than the city of Wuppertal. The city only existed as a single municipality since 1929, so half the time the article talks about "Wuppertal", it really means Barmen and Elberfeld.

So if there was no municipality, who did plan, approve and fund the project? Both cities, in a joint planning commission.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn#Histor...

atombender• 1 year ago

I think the paragraph is quite clear. The cities merged later, and the "which merged..." part is only clarifying that the Schwebebahn was created while the current town was two separate towns.

xg152• 1 year ago

It's technically correct, just confusing. I think what tripped me up was that he keeps using the city's name as a shorthand even for the time when it didn't exist yet. That sort of blurs the two events even though they were 30 years apart.

looofooo0• 1 year ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuffi

An elephant once fell out of it and survived.

Radle2• 1 year ago

I‘ve grown up in Wuppertal if you‘ve got and questions i‘d be happy to answer.

pimeys2• 1 year ago

I would love to visit in the Wuppertal's new club: Open Ground. Mark Ernestus is a legend, and they have an exceptional sound system in there.

Radle2• 1 year ago

Huh, I didn’t even notice a new Club has opened.

There’s a free entry event on Thursday I’ll go and check out Open Ground.

glkindlmann• 1 year ago

I learned about the Schwebebahn from this[1] YT video (from The Tim Traveller), which goes into the history of why it made sense to build a suspended rail at this particular place and time. A more recent video [2] gives a much more detailed history.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IFh6wFTJiQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI5DehAuT2I

lproven2• 1 year ago

I went through Wuppertal on the train in February after FOSDEM and saw the schwebebahn with my own eyes for the first time.

I wish I'd jumped off and taken a ride... but I was on an Interrail ticket, and my seat cost me €50. If I'd given it up, I'd have had to buy another one...

jonp888• 1 year ago

That's quite strange. Unlike in say France or Spain, all domestic trains in Germany should be reservation free for all Interrail ticket holders, including the fastest ICE trains.

lproven2• 1 year ago

I boarded in Brussels, though.

I was very nearly thrown off. I tried to buy a reservation in the station; I was told it was full. I decided to take my chances.

It was well under 50% full, but the conductor tried to throw me off anyway. Only when I protested, a lot, did he concede that I although I would not want to I could buy a seat on the train, but it was €50. He was amazed I was willing to pay, but the alternative was paying less at the station and losing yet another hour -- maybe two.

Interrail is cheap, but the big international trains try to make it difficult for you to use it.

Riding high in Germany on the world's oldest suspended railway

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