The Many Faces of Berlin U-Bahn Line U7 | Hacker News Reader

The Many Faces of Berlin U-Bahn Line U7

berlintypography.wordpress.com

149 pointsClewza31333 comments

My favourite thing about U7 is the Jungfernheide station. It sort of quite bland and even neglected but... it hides an extra platform that was supposed to connect centre of the city with Berlin Airport (now sadly closed).

The station also used to connect to Siemensbahn which is a totally dilapidated and forgotten train line with a huge historical significance for the city.

My favorite station in Berlin is where they don’t shoot drugs or smoke. Not that many, actually.

Welcome to U8 Schoenleinstr! Believe or not it was used to be okay for me just 4~5 years ago.. now it's almost same as cesspit.

I lived off Schönleinstraße and can attest to this. I heard it was due to a crackdown in Hermanplatz pushing people one stop over?

I think it’s more because of the police at Kotti

Also crackdown and constant police presence on Kotti.

I haven’t been to SF, but I heard that excrements are essential for being a startup capital.

Try looking around Friedenau, one of the most peaceful and posh parts of the inner city.

For what it's worth, I believe there are plans to reactivate the Siemensbahn tracks for a new line by 2025... or so I've read? Can't quite remember.

Quite appropriately, there are plans to reactivate it to serve the new Siemens research campus that is currently under construction.

Which airport was that? Tempelhof?

Tegel.

Tempelhof has a subway station right in front of it.

Crying emoji

I didn’t realise Tegel finally closed! What a dream airport that was

Oh wow, they closed it last November? I hadn’t realised. I flew through there the last time I was in Berlin, January of last year (was supposed to go again during the summer but then covid prevented that)

As a kid of the 70s personally I like the 70s colors.

I also like when you get out in Spandau, you leave a big city underground station and enter a small village. Surreal to me everytime.

"The name of the station is written across five separate tiles, making it easier to replace in the event of damage."

Berlin in one sentence.

And because Gneisenaustrasse is mentioned, stumbled into a drug deal there last weekend, awkward moment.

If anybody is interested in exploring this line in a virtual 3D environment, there is a standalone simulator game for the U7 line that was released by TML-Studios 10-ish years ago, and it's available on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/283600/World_of_Subways_2...

You can drive the entire line in the game and get out and walk around each station in a first person view. IIRC the individual architectural details of each stop are pretty well modelled, and keeping the train on schedule and stopping at the right stop at each platform is a fun challenge.

This line, which far too long for its own good and sort-of meanders through space, is quite the example of “political geography”.

The typography this article focuses on is a microcosm of how the place reminds you of its history, including both the beauty and whimsical, as well as the crimes against kerning and/or humanity.

May Berlin forever resist uniforms and uniformity.

To elaborate on the "political geography", the U7 and the U9 were the only lines of substantial length that for the most part opened after the division of Berlin and are centered on West Berlin's center around Charlottenburg, rather than the prewar/modern center of Mitte.

Here's an interesting BVG map from 1977, showing the divided network and U7 under construction: https://transitmap.net/west-berlin-1977/ Note that pretty much every major line other than U7 and U9 has an abandoned or pass-through segment due to the division.

Thank you for your comment. It is like a fine New Yorker article in very short form.

I too was surprised by how much I enjoyed an article about such a niche yet mundane subject.

This thread made me read this article. I think if I had visited without I wouldn't have got past the first paragraph. Really glad I read it. Strangely joyful.

The first thing I looked for was whether they mention the horrible kerning at Mehringdamm. Was not disappointed.

The correct way to photograph the U7 station markers is through the 20 commuters pressed together and around you. For a paper photograph, I'd suggest adding old cigarette smoke with a subtle bouquet of urine.

I started a modernisation project... http://github.com/chrismsimpson/Neukolln

As an artist I actually like the crazy colorful tiles signs.

The sign for Richard-Wagner-Platz needs a clean background. It fades into the stormy seas [0] of the tiles.

[0] Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer

I take this line every day! I live off of the Konstanzer Strase stop. I never thought I’d see this on HN!

It's been soon a year since I've been in that U-bahn line. I live close to the Karl-Marx-Straße station and before the pandemic I definitely visited every station of that line as weekend activity throughout the years I've been in Berlin.

An old colleague of mine told me his father used to travel that line from Rudow to Spandau every morning to work, and in the evening back home again. That trip is almost two hours completely underground.

Lucky we are, working from home and not needing to commute anymore...

A sort of spiritual counterpart (capitalist/communist, yin/yang, Luke/Vader, take your pick) to U7 is U5, the only line built by East Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U5_(Berlin_U-Bahn)

Colored what a friend of mine calls scheisse brown, it sprouts out of central East Berlin (Alexanderplatz) far out into the countryside, with forests, fields and dense clusters of commieblocks tightly packed around stations.

And these days it goes all the way to Hauptbahnhof!

And Turmstraße and Jungfernheide are already prepared for crossing it.

Hasn’t that officially been shelved in favor of the tram?

so did wes anderson have a life-changing ride on this line, or what

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