Ride through Wuppertal on ‘the flying train’ in clear footage from 1902 | Hacker News Reader

Ride through Wuppertal on ‘the flying train’ in clear footage from 1902

thisiscolossal.com

327 pointsgmays130 comments

A side-by-side view of 1902 vs current:

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

As an aside, I find it interesting that this steel wasn't reclaimed sometime during WWII when the industrial machine was desperate for iron/metal.

Wow! that‘s a fascinating video collage – thanks for sharing!

a) getting people to their jobs was likely deemed more important than the paltry amount of metal it could have provided

b) I'm pretty sure that's not the original structure

When the suspension rail was build, Wuppertal was one centre of the German steel production, so steel was available. I don't know how much of the original structure survived World War 2 but it should be more or less original from the original construction. But I'm kinda curious now. I will ask the WSW for a comment.

Some of the buildings adjoining it are the same.

Thanks for sharing, this brought back some great memories. I grew up in Wuppertal and took the Schwebebahn all the time, fantastic ride to avoid traffic. You can still book the classical Kaiserwagen I believe for special occasions, although I think it may not be possible now during COVID.

https://www.wuppertal.de/kaiserwagen

covid or other reasons - it will be available again presumably in autumn 2021.

> Der Betrieb des Kaiserwagens ist derzeit nicht möglich. Wir gehen davon aus, dass der Kaiserwagen im Herbst 2021 wieder fährt.

Thanks for sharing. I watched the MoMA original and thought that there is no way that system survived shortages of two world wars. And, what a testament to the turn of the century industrialization in Germany to be able to produce such a system.

The trees are gone and the parking spots are in. A necessary evil for a modern society sure, but definitely a less beautiful society.

I agree with everything you said - besides the "necessary" part.

As someone that currently (not going to sit in full trains/subways for 2h a day the way it is right now) sits in the car for around 100 minutes a day (at least for every day me and the little one commute in) - I really like cars for technical/nostalgic reasons, but god I hate cars so much.

It is not what a single car does, it is what happens when everyone drives cars - out of necessity and even worse: "for fun". The emissions, the wasted space, the streets, the parking, the noise, the stress, the anger (had a young girl on a bike beat my passenger window and swearing like a dock-worker because of a slightly dangerous confusion), the pain, the costs (for individuals and the society). It is just sad.

And no, sorry, electric cars will only solve one aspect of all the issues caused by everyone sitting in his own car. Autonomous driving only some others. There is no way ever growing societies can sensibly continue this way.

I want my train ride back. My little one also.

It's disgusting how many cars we have in cities, isn't it. Why do all these people need cars? They're even literally parking under a railway line.

I was wondering just what, exactly, made the old one look so pleasant, and why the new one looked so much more dreary by comparison. I think this is it.

If you pause at 00:36 you can see the same view on google maps today https://goo.gl/maps/4oskPzyT5MRCma1PA

Awesome video!

Thank you! What a great find. You don't often get this kind of historical document.

Agreed about scrapping the train. Glad they didn't.

There is also full speed-corrected colorized version:

https://youtu.be/EQs5VxNPhzk

Born and bred Wuppertaler here! The so called "Schwebebahn" is not only a tourist attraction but really a ubiquitous means of transport - my mother used it for commuting on a daily basis.

However, from what I heard they introduced some new trains which have severe issues (heavy attrition, scratching noises etc) so that currently, the Schwebebahn is actually "closed" for a whole year! (Having never experienced this in my 19 years living there, I assume it's a very rare and unfortunate situation)

What a neat system it is; I traveled there in 2015 specifically to ride the Schwebebahn, and I was absolutely astounded by this system. What a pleasant presence, so graceful. It really opened my eyes to what was possible at the turn of the 20th century.

In 1999 the Schwebebahn had the first fatal accident when a train ran into a claw that was fixed to the rail by a repair crew and was forgotten to be removed again.

It was considered to be so safe that when someone reported the accident, the personnel at the emergency central didn't take them seriously first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Wuppertal_Schwebebahn_acc...

The most famous incident on the other hand is probably the one where a circus elephant was taken on the train as a publicity stunt in the 1950s, got understandably unhappy and bounced around enough that it and some people fell out of the train into the river.

I got curious about this one and read about it on the wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn#Incident...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuffi

Those only do only mention the elephant jumping out, but nobody else.

indeed, seems I misremembered.

The elephant was named Tuffi and today there's a brand of flavoured milk called after her.

Here are two fairly recent YouTube videos in English about the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn:

* Tom Scott ("Why Wuppertal's Suspended Monorail Wasn't The Future Of Travel"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4KZLcvMQWg

* The Tim Traveller ("Schwebebahn: Why Wuppertal's Trains Are Much Cooler Than Yours"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IFh6wFTJiQ

If you want to compare it throughout the years, here's a video of it in 1993: https://youtu.be/4_8u7t5q3m4

And in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgfRq4kEFro

The 4K upgraded version, with good speed correction and somewhat lame colorization.[1]

Here's a cab ride today, from the back end.[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/EQs5VxNPhzk?t=17

[2] https://youtu.be/uPj0CDfpEm0

Somehow the original in B&W seems more lifelike.

Yeah, unless you're on LSD, colors don't change on objects like that. The steel legs couldn't decide if they were baby blue or pink or rusty orange.

There is a famous story about an elefant (named Tuffi) riding in the Schwebebahn in the 50s for some sort of promotional stunt[1]. We'll the elefant got scared leading to this [2] awesome somewhat surreal picture. Supposedly (and surprisingly) the elefant was not injured.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuffi [2] https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/e5041ec1-0001-0004-00...

According to WP, what led to this picture is photo editing.

The article says this style of railway is unique to Germany. I'd say it is also unique in Germany -- as far as I know, there is no other place that has it.

Well. There is this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hshgs3-oRQ

Oh yes, and this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv8MTufKRQQ

It is less than 100km from Wuppertal...

And you can use it with the same ticket, because VRR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsverbund_Rhein-Ruhr

Also the Shonan Monorail, from Ofuna to Shonan-Enoshima to the south west from Tokyo.

Full ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQbFTxpnGZY

Ride & walk through Enoshima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFLpEvRvjZc

We rode it back in 2017 and it's really an interesting experience & as far as I can tell the only top rail monorail with tunnels. :)

Also as mentioned already, this is not a tourist gimmick - while Enoshima is indeed very nice and a popular tourist destination - it is evident most of the people on board are locals using it for commuting and generally moving around. And it seems to be very good at it, running over an often steep ridge & over roads, it provides fast and convenient transportation without wasting space.

Also due to using rubber wheels instead of the steel wheels the Schwebebahn uses it can (and does!) negotiate much steeper gradient present on the route.

A+++, would ride again. ;-)

Dresden?

Not sure how the monorails in Japan or in Memphis relate to the Wuppertal construction.

There's nothing quite like the Schwebebahn, but there are a few other suspended monorails out there, also known as SAFEGE monorails after the French company that commercialized the technology. The largest is the Chiba Urban Monorail near Tokyo, which is actually a two-line network:

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

Pro tip: JR trains from Narita Airport to central Tokyo pass through Chiba station, so you can hop off and go for a suspended monorail ride!

There's the H-Bahn at the campus of the technical university of Dortmund: https://youtu.be/ObuNVqBD9jA

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Bahn

Also I just learned that the same model is being used at the Düsseldorf airport

The colorized video at the bottom has a steampunk appeal to it. I'm surprised this track is still operating today!

Great 1900s truss construction. But what a visual blight on the riverfront and the city streets.

I wonder what the town meetings looked like? Did they have NIMBYs? Did Chicago have NIMBYs when the ell was being built?

"But what a visual blight on the riverfront and the city streets."

A very late-20th and current 21st century perspective. This is 1902; if you were actually there your first impression would probably be more like "wow, that's a lot of horse crap on the roads". If you look you can see quite a bit of it in the roads in the video... if you know what you're looking for. 21st century eyes are not looking for that in the video and probably just assumed it was noise or rocks.

I'm not saying you're right or wrong in that persective; just observing it is a product of your time and probably not something they'd agree with.

I think its magnificent, beautiful!

And people back ten apparently thought so as well, as they even "photoshoped" these monorails, airships, cablecars, baloons, trams, motorcycles and other gadgets on top of real photos and sold the result as postcards (best link I could find, sorry):

https://www.burda-auction.com/en/mail-auction-29/show/2207/p...

https://www.burda-auction.com/en/public-auction-62/show/1390...

https://www.burda-auction.com/en/mail-auction-19/show/2168/p...

https://www.burda-auction.com/en/mail-auction-27/show/2158/p...

This is how people viewed progress and looked forward into the future back then. And it still makes me sad when some nice and intricate industrial infrastructure is simply razed and replaced by anonymous blocks of flats or clone-like office building. This stuff has soul!

Do you mean the train is a visual blight? I have to disagree, it's magnificent.

The buildings too when compared to modern-day Wuppertal. I wonder how we allowed the postwar construction to be so damned ugly everywhere. What would a beautiful building with a proper decorated facade cost these days? Would it really be prohibitively expensive?

My main thoughts exactly.

Every city in Europe (that wasn't completely bombed) has a an "old town" or "old city center" where all the tourists stay. The tourists stay there, because the old part is the only part that's considered pretty. It's usually a relatively small part of the city where most buildings are in the same old consistent style with generally lots of details on buildings.

Then there's the rest of the city with post-war/modern absolutely soulless ugly buildings that have been optimized to be built as fast as possible, as cheap as possible and as large as allowed. Just plain depressing minimalist squares with no details. Esthetics are not a relevant part of modern building (engineering) goals in Europe now it seems. To me it is close to "Soviet building style". The only modern exception I can think of in the entire world would be Singapore.

Seeing that German village from the flying train I can't help but think that quality of public life was better than it is now in Europe. I'm referring to: way way way less traffic, almost no combustion engine driven traffic, cleaner air and water (possibly?), larger homes, no AirBNB in the city centers, all buildings look as new, all buildings look super well maintained, tons of space for traffic, green/trees everywhere and most importantly: addictive/toxic constant distractions such as smartphones had yet to be invented. Look at all those people walking around and DOING things without staring at screens! wow! And kids still played outside? woah

Conclusion: definitely not all aspects of life improved with time.

PS: yes, I realize some aspects of life back then where way worse than they are now for the average person.

The thing that struck me was the lack of traffic jams on the section over the street, compared to today's Wuppertal.

What happened to all the traffic? Okay, that's easy: population increased.

But before I accept that as an answer, I want to know how a city with population low enough to have essenstially no traffic managed to have enough ability to construct and run such a difficult traffic project? Whereas today, given a town with the same size and amount of trafic as 1902 Wuppertal, the towns I know tend to close bus lines instead of maintaining regular ones.

I have a sad hunch this has something to do with cars and no one caring, but can't really come up with anything real.

The population hasn't grown that much, Wuppertal has a bit over 350k inhabitants now, Barmen and Elberfeld (which became Wuppertal in 1929) had a combined population of slightly under 300k in 1900.

The traffic jams are mostly the result of lifestyle choices.

It's less about the number of people and more about the percentage of them that can afford a vehicle. Horses are expensive (lots of upkeep). Cars are expensive too, but not as expensive as a pair of horses. Society is today quite a lot wealthier than it was a hundred years ago partly because cars are so inexpensive, but it does mean that the roads are more crowded.

Now that I think about it, I don't quite remember the number of pedestrians on the streets this century. I think it is slightly higher now compared to then, but the total number of people outside is definitely higher.

Reading the sibling comment, with constant population, this probably boils down to lifestyle choices. Do people live farther away from workplaces now? Are businesses more centralized/spread out? What would have to change to recover the lost freedom from traffic while keeping the population content?

Are the buildings well-maintained or are they just relatively new in the 1902 footage? There's less traffic, but obviously you're seeing one of the smallest slivers of the German population in 1902. What did the rest of Germany live like? Also, what conditions would they experience in the 20s that would lead the events of the 30s and 40s? It's doubtful that in the time of horse manure and industries dumping waste into rivers with no regulations whatsoever that the water was cleaner.

I'll say that it does seem to be a quaint city avenue in 1902. Very walkable and enjoyable. They probably enjoyed a stronger sense of community back then. I do think as a side effect of our insular, climate-controlled buildings and cars and smart phone doom-scrolling, we probably feel less connected to community and nature.

Yah well. For one, that is no village, but a long agglomeration of several towns along the valley where the Wupper river happens to flow through. Elberfeld, Barmen, Vohwinkel, ... nowadays Wuppertal. Get it? Valley of the Wupper. That was one of many industrial cores, hubs, clustered there. Solingen may ring a bell for its steel, knives, scissors, chains, maybe? Right next to it. I can tell you from personal experience about 70 to 90 years later, that it looked rather ugly, because of all the soot and acid in the air. Like the whole region called Ruhrpott/Ruhrgebiet (Though technically Wuppertal is Bergisches Land). When I visited my relatives going from Bonn am Rhein to Hagen in Westfalen by train, looking out of the open window, I had a black face. That was even more extreme towards Hagen because of Hasper Hütte, of which I witnessed the last operations at a very young age. Everything there was dirty because of heavy industry.

Anyways, if you are interested in it, you could read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Heritage_Trail and the links from there.

Even better would be https://www.route-industriekultur.ruhr/

but I fail to get the english version though I remember they once had one. Maybe it works for you, and I'm just too stupid, or it's some geo-thing.

After British dehousing people wanted to have a roof over their head, beauty was not the first priority.

Yes, I'm not saying that was a bad idea, or Khrushchyovkas either. But even today a new building in major, expensive spot in any capital will likely be ugly. Functionalism and modernism have mostly produced just eyesores.

Like the other commenter said, every tourist stays in old town centers as everything else looks so bad, almost everywhere around the world except maybe some skyscraper districts. We know what looks good, and presumably could still build like that. Why won't we?

Do you pay?

What?

The difference between SimCity like lego-blocks built by the lowest bidder/contractor according to current standards, or something with "character"?

I don't get it. We have powerlines on every street yet NIMBYs complained about a single cell-tower being built in my hometown. Whether something is an 'eyesore' or not seems totally arbitrary. And in my view, this one has a real beauty, like a city skyline - totally artificial yet vibrant and exhilarating.

People originally objected to the Eiffel Tower as being an eyesore. It was also built as an advertisement.

The trend is to always hide everything as much as possible. I think that creates an uncanny valley effect. Better to paint things bright vibrant colours rather than bland grey.

They had "this is blasphemous work against god" arguments, that annoying enough? ;)

But also needed better transportation, and no real alternatives on offer.

Yeah I don't think NIMBYism took off until a couple decades later. Either way, this is a very impressive engineering achievement for 1902. They probably imagined that all cities would implement something like this. I rather like the design. It is steampunk.

At that time at that place NIMBYs would have been tared and feathered, or something similar. Which applies to the whole region, and time, I think.

Depends on how you see it. Many see cars and buses and (insanely expensive) light-rail on streets as a visual blight.

The Wuppertal footprint is very large. Compare to (the very economical 1970s design of) the Dortmund H-Bahn: each pylon uses about 1m2 of ground. Clearly designed to please engineers, not contractors and investors.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dortmund_H-Bahn

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dortmund_H-Bahn#...

Cities look so much more fun to explore when pedestrian-focused

I wonder what the double wheel the kids were pushing was for.

ha yes, that was the one thing in video that really caught my eye. not sure why

My guess is they went to the wheel shop with their dad's to pick a couple of new wheels for the cart. If you get 2 you can just tie them together and roll them home.

Ah yes the wheel shop, of course

40-43s for anyone else curious.

Either two for repair or newly made/repaired I'd guess.

Frame rate was slow when filmed. Looks about right if you slow it down to 50% in youtube. Maybe somebody could run it through some interpolation software...

I think its about the video at bottom of the page. This one is slowed down.

upscaled, interpolated and colorized by AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk

look, how every house is beige and changes color. I sincerely enjoy the bw-version much more.

Colorization is far from perfect indeed. I'm not sure how they model the temporal dimension (recognizing the same object in the prev/next frame and painting it of the same color - unless it has to be different because of shadows, lighting change, etc.) in these neural nets, does anyone know?

I wish publishing pre-sound era films in their original framerate was a common practice. However, for some reason it seems to be beyond the scope of people handling these restorations.

Even with 100,000+ inhabitants at the time of construction, it seems to be tremendously expensive to build. At the same time, impressive engineering. For some reason, I imagine maritime design engineers could achieve this most readily, given that it appears to be a 'first article'.

The practically non existent land use is a massive savings. It runs down a long valley which is extremely space constrained and mostly sits over the river. By comparison the largest cost of road networks in cities is opportunity cost. Something like 20% of the surface of NYC is roads, that’s hundreds of billions of dollars worth of land and massive amount of lost property taxes.

IIRC the current form of Grand Central station in New York was built when they buried all the tracks leading to it underground, to free up for building what is now some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

You're thinking of Penn Station, not Grand Central. Grand Central was always that way.

Penn Station was originally above ground, and then rebuilt underground in the 60s, beneath Madison Square Garden, built at the same time.

Grand Central has a fairly large and very ornate above-ground structure taking up half a city block.

I mean the tracks leading to Grand Central, that were buried and built over: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Terminal#Termi...

(And it's all Internet knowledge, I've never been there.)

I'd think in Germany the share of public vs. private wealth is very different from USA, more so back then.

And just 20 years or so later, many of the kids in the video would probably be dead :(

Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday captures how much of a shock it was to move from the progress-and-civilisation of his corner of the nineteenth century to the fake-news[1]-and-senseless-violence[2] of the twentieth (Zweig hung on after the first barbaric shock, but gave up after the second. I think Schachnovelle pretty much captures the mood he must've been in.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23777984

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895444

[2] we're all familiar with this; I had had better hopes for the twenty-first...

Would be great to see someone run this through some photogrammetry software. Meshroom is free and open source and would do it. I am pretty busy lately but if anyone wants the glory... download the video with youtube-dl, extract frames with ffmpeg, and pull out frames from one contiguous section (the footage jumps), then run it through meshroom. If anyone does it please share!

https://alicevision.org/

A hanging rail train sounds much more complicated than a train running on top of tracks. I wonder why they chose that configuration? Or maybe a 1 rail hanging configuration takes much less material than 2 rails?

edit: sounds like there's some confusion in replies. What I mean is even if elevated, why not elevate traditional 2-rail train tracks, instead of a hanging train?

I think the route for the train follows the river in parts.

Hardly. The infrastructure keeping those trains above ground is tremendous. But keeping them elevated they do not interfere with existing traffic patterns.

The video shows why: because it could be stacked on top of rivers, tramway tracks and streets, and it would not affect traffic underneath.

On one hand, it does looks like a lot of resources and needlessly complex engineering. On the other hand, it's an interesting way of solving problems for which there was no clear solution at the time. We tried all sorts of things before settling on putting trains basically either in tunnels or on elevated tracks.

Interestingly, the Wuppertal Schwebebahn (in the video) still operates.

Apparently some local industrialist had an experimental one in his factory, and the proposal won out against competing designs which put a more "normal" rail pair elevated over the river. And back when it was planned any elevated train system was a big new thing, and the difficult bit either way was building over the river.

You mean why don’t they put the train on top of the elevated rail? Good question. They did that in the US. Maybe the winding European streets would have too many tight corners the train would have to slow for?

Some modern top rail monorails do it like that: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sh%C5%8Dnan_Mono...

The rails is a steel girder with two raceways around a slot inside. The cars hang from T-shaped boogies that come in via the slot and ride on rubber wheels on the raceways.

Why? At the speeds it goes it's mostly self-stabilized by its own weight. Only slight swings, no real rocking, and if curve is too sharp it slows down. I remember it going more like 40kph and thinking: "Hey, I could be faster on my bicycle!"

More footage about the line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2roHdZ9UB9Y

I don't speak the language but the auto transcribe and auto translate seems to work ok.

Beautiful. I love how few cars there are.

I was coming to post this exact sentiment. The city and its people really shine when the roads are used by people, there are many pedestrian bridges, etc. I love seeing spaces used by humans, not by cars.

Best "cab ride" video ever!

This is the infamous Wuppertaler Schwebebahn. What's with people calling cities and towns in foreign countries villages? Being unbeknownst to you doesn't mean it's a village. Wuppertal is home to 350 thousands inhabitants an counting. Wuppertal is the result of th fusion of several existing cities including Ebersfeld which had over 100 thousand people in 1895 and considered then a Großstadt.

>What's with people calling cities and towns in foreign countries villages?

I dunno. Why do we call them neighborhoods when hardly anyone knows their neighbors?

Because even if you don't know them they're still your neighbors.

Why do we call them “drive ways” when we park in them? Why do we call them “parkways” when we drive on them?

The amount of traffic on some parkways can make one feel as if they park there though.

Often people who are non-native speakers of English don't know the difference between town and village. I hear plenty Dutch people say that they're from a village, while town would probably be a better word.

Only because once you leave the Netherlands, the true size of things suddenly becomes clear.

I doubt town and village are used consistently in the Anglosphere either. They tend to be used fairly consistently in New England (though I can think of exceptions) where it's not so much about absolute size but whether they have a town government or are part of a larger entity.

In Illinois, the distinction is one based on how the municipality was incorporated:

The town of Cicero, the village of Winnetka, the city of Evanston—though some of these designations seem quainter than others, they have nothing to do with population or size. “It really all depends on which statute under state law the municipality incorporated under,” says David Bennett, executive director of the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, an association of 272 area leaders who convene to collaborate and converse about the health of the metro area. Towns are municipalities that were created prior to the 1872 passing of the Cities and Villages Act, which set out standards and guidelines for incorporation. Established in 1867, Cicero happens to be the only town in the Chicago area. The distinctions between the terms city and village are more ambiguous. In states such as New York, “cities and villages can differ according to how the state defines them, in terms of the procedures for setting them up, the governance structures and the powers allotted to them automatically by the municipal code,” says Joshua Drucker, assistant professor of urban planning and policy at DePaul University, who researched the topic when he moved to Illinois four years ago. “But in Illinois, there’s very little difference. The largest remaining difference is that villages must have exactly six trustees, whereas cities may have six or more aldermen.”

https://www.timeout.com/chicago/things-to-do/city-village-to...

I live in a village (Oak Park) with population 52,381 adjacent to a city (Berwyn) with population 54,391 and a town (Cicero) with population 80,796

Townships in New York are county subdivisions that are large enough to encompass multiple villages. Not what is conventionally considered a town.

> In South Africa, the terms township and location usually refer to the often underdeveloped racially segregated urban areas that, from the late 19th century until the end of apartheid, were reserved for non-whites, namely Indians, Africans and Coloureds.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township_(South_Africa)

I was somewhat confused when I first heard about townships in the US ;)

I think it's similar in Pennsylvania where I grew up. The small groupings within a township (or that can straddle townships) are apparently officially census designated places according to Wikipedia. But the same articles seem to refer to them colloquially as towns or villages interchangeably. I'm pretty sure we called them towns when I was growing up.

There is quite a variation of governmental divisions within the US and what's important or even what exists in one state or region may not be so in another state or region. And informal nomenclature varies as well.

Where I live a village is what real estate agents call the massive block of suburbia they just built in the middle of nowhere. Or some sort of outdoor shopping center.

That's because "tuin" which sounds exactly like Town means something totally different in Dutch (garden)

I come from a town of (then) about 350 people in California. After living in Europe for a while I started calling it a village. Americans always look at me funny... but there's a town of 3,000 nearby that calls itself a "small town" and the town next to that, with 13,000, also calls itself a "small town," so how are we supposed to differentiate?

So hunch is that some people think of "town" as covering anything from 1-250,000 people (arbitrary upper bound mine) and think "village" is something foreigners have instead of towns.

That said, it's absurd to call Wuppertal a village, the pictures are obviously not of a village, and Schweben is not Fliegen! :-)

Where I'm from, Northeast US, town vs. city is a matter of how the government is organized. I grew up in a city of 10k people, and later lived in a town of 50k. Here, at least, a village is a designation often used to indicate the "town center" or more densely developed areas of otherwise fairly spread out towns.

It’s legislated in Germany ;)

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

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtrecht

The Stadtrecht phenomenon is what makes people call Dutch cities cities too. Legally, the term 'city' ('stad') doesn't even exist nowadays here, so it mostly a term used intuitively and according to historical legacy.

Interestingly, the Dutch province of Frisia famously features eleven cities (all historically holders of Dutch stadsrechten) of which the smallest has just over 700 inhabitants, whilst the biggest 'village' in the province boasts over 45,000.

It's worth noting that, if you're in New England, "town" carries a different meaning than in much of the rest of the country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_town

I spent a lot of time in New England. There, it tends to be all municipalities are legally designated towns, and if the town has a certain minimum population, it can choose to reorganize as a city. The two differ primarily in style of government: towns are run by boards of selectmen (or aldermen or selectperson .. there are many terms for the same thing) via the town meeting, whereas cities are run by a mayor (which may or may not also have a council which runs similarly to the board of selectmen). Town and city are the only legal designation, and things like village and hamlet carry no such ramifications. “Village” might simply be part of the name of a municipality (e.g. Sturbridge Village), or it may refer to a particular neighborhood within a larger municipality [0]. We sometimes call small municipalities by the ocean a fishing village, but again village has no legal meaning there.

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

Perhaps calling a foreign place a village is a way of downplaying it, so that the listener does not feel that they were expected to know the place by name, perhaps?

Since we're on the grammar train.

Infamous means: well known for some bad quality or deed, such as "an infamous war criminal".

What is the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn infamous for?

No, no, no... infamous just means you are so famous you are IN famous.

Merriam Webster disagrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infamous

Definition of infamous

1: having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil an infamous traitor

2: causing or bringing infamy : DISGRACEFUL an infamous crime

3: convicted of an offense bringing infamy

I think that was a reference to the movie The Three Amigos. The characters misunderstanding the word sent them off on their unintentionally heroic adventure.

Ahh.

I had actually wondered if it could also just mean "famous" (but not necessarily in a bad way) like notorious can but apparently not. I had to look it up to be sure.

Maybe you're thinking of "inflammable," which due to confusion has mostly been shortened to "flammable."

Well at least SOMEONE got the reference!

It is infamous for the 1950 publicity stunt in which they put an elephant on board. The elephant got scared and jumped out.

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

It's a train that travels through through the same region but misusing 'village' or 'infamous' are not cars on the grammar train.

Ok, we've de-villaged and Wuppertaled the title above.

Calling it a Village is not really correct. Wuppertal had 100's of thousands of inhabitants at that point.

Fixed above.

This is a terrible article. As far as I’m the first in line to bitch about small places calling themselves cities or towns, Wuppertal is far from being a village by any standard.

At the beginning there's more people walking and hanging out, than I'm used to seeing (in a sparsely developed area). If it were post WWII US, I wouldn't expect to see anyone outside all day.

Post WWII US covers 75 years. As a kid in the 70s I remember there being lots of people outside during the day in suburban Chicago: kids playing, moms walking to or from the store, there was still a guy on a bicycle cart who drove around offering knife sharpening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com