Riding high in Germany on the world's oldest suspended railway | Hacker News Reader

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

theguardian.com

195 pointspseudolus108 comments

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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!

Don't forget the reason for all that firebombing: Germans voted for a guy who promised to make Germany great again. Worked out great in the end. It was the greatest end of a war ever. What a great guy he was.

I don't think they questioned the reason for bombing civilians. They questioned the utility.

> 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.

That's a common myth. Ornaments don't have to be expensive. Besides, many of the old buildings we consider beautiful today were meant for lower-income families back in the day.

ornaments are expensive now (at least, the ways done historically) because modernism put a generation of artisans out of work and no one trained to be skilled in a dying industry. now it's incredibly specialized.

Horse poop wasn't exactly great too.

Not to step in with your good shoes, and the tonnages to remove in large urban areas like London and New York were substantial, sure.

Thing is, horse poop and straw is great for gardens, weed suppression, growing food and flowers.

Can't really say the same for tyre particles, fuel emissions, and while the bulk long term CO2 buildup beyond the established balance might make things "greener" it doesn't seem to advance nutritional returns of vegetation enough to offset the climate altering downsides.

Disease was a really big problem. The history suggests there was far too much of it for gardens to make much of an impact in it. There was also a lot of horse urine to deal with too.

There are a bunch of problems with cars, but I'd much rather live in one of those cities as they are today than with no cars but mountains of horse manure everywhere.

Modern New York frequently has mountains of unremoved waste whenever there's a sanitation dispute .. it's a problem that hasn't been solved.

New York and London of yore had logistical challenges that could have been improved, London famously rebuilt its sewers to address the the miasma, and there are many uses for urine, horse or human, if gathered.

It's more an infrastructure issue, dealing with waste, than an intrinsic failing of one mode of transport over another.

It is exactly an intrinsic failing of one mode of transport over another, that it produces unsanitary biological waste which at scale makes life pretty unpleasant in big cities. "It's an infrastructure issue" doesn't help if the infrastructure to solve the problem didn't exist and wasn't getting built (London's sewer upgrade was built some time before the horse situation was considered critical and was primarily to address problems with human effluent).

CO2 isn't unsanitary, although it is biological waste (some millenia removed from its time of origin) and the first major London Sewerage upgrade was mentioned as an example of building infrastructure at scale not as an example of removing horseshit .. that situation wasn't seen as serious enough to address with a dedicated grand scale service prior to ceasing to be a problem as horses went away.

For many decades the lead additives in petrol met the unsanitary definition (second clause) being "unhealthy and therefore likely to cause disease" withoiut being biological.

It appears, to myself at least, that "exactly" is less clear cut than you make out; no major effort was made to address horse waste (past the daily sit carts and shovels) and petrol, rubber particles, noise, increased speeds, etc come with a new set of problems which have still not been addressed.

Horse poop is not great for gardens. Horses - unlike cows - don't have a digestive system able handle seeds so those pass through and end up in your garden. using horsepoop in the garden means the weeds grow very well.

I made this mistake once. It took forever to get the thistle under control.

We've literally put three tonnes of donkey poop (ok, not horse, but very similar) a year on the garden for the past decade (and longer, but I've not been involved in that prior) and had none of the issues you've raised.

They might track back to your fields of feed origin.

It's been fantastic for moisture retention, breaking down to increase soil complexity, weed suppression, making better figs, tomatoes, potatoes, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, grapes, etc.

( We've also used sheep manure scraped out from under shearing sheds, horse manure, sluiced out pig run waste, etc )

Call it a locale specific outcome perhaps.

Horse manure emits methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Dried up it also becomes brittle and susceptible to turning into PM emissions if disturbed.

It was way more of a problem than just aesthetics and cars, even in their early days, appeared cleaner overall.

The one thing we never got back are noise levels - modern cities are loud.

Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...

Horse poop would be an improvement over some of the stuff on the streets nowadays.

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".

> Apart from it being entirely subjective

Maybe not entirely. Eye-tracking studies suggest that ornaments are what attracts people's attention.

People attend to detail whatever its aesthetic value. Look at an eye tracking study of people looking at faces - of course they look at eyes and lips rather than the middle of the cheeks, but if someone had a massive, suppurating boil in the middle of their cheek you can bet that's what people would look at.

So you're suggesting adding boils to buildings to make them more interesting and less plain?

Is that really what you think I meant?

RIP all those street trees too.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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...

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.

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.

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

+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.

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?

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

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

I’ve seen a lot more monorails than just two. Are we talking only about hanging monorails (since I was about both above and below)?

The one that immediately comes to mind is the Tama monorail.

Yurikamome Is technically not a monorail, but it pretty close in terms of experience.

Tokyo Disney Resort Line is also an actual monorail.

Japan indeed has many monorails, but only the two I mentioned are suspended. The Ueno Zoo monorail was also suspended, but it was a bit of a toy and it's decommissioned now anyway.

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

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

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.

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.

Why would they need a bigger tunnel? Monorails are usually built to a smaller loading gauge than conventional rail.

I've never seen a monorail that wasn't on some massive rail, about a foot by a foot in cross section or more.

That raises the monorail floor, which makes the whole thing larger.

Modern trams can have nearly-ground-level floors.

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

It's rare to need much in the way of tunnels on an elevated line, by its very nature. And since the beam is narrower than the carriages, it doesn't actually increase the tunnel diameter (for a round cross section) that much.

> 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.

These days there are systems that have been built for decades by big name manufacturers, often the same manufacturers that make trains. Hitachi or Alstom-nee-Bombardier aren't going to disappear and leave their clients high and dry, if only because it would be bad for their broader rail businesses to do so.

I'm no fan of monorails - quite the opposite - but there are cases where they work.

Those are still single vendor systems so if your vendor disappears - as has happened - you are stuck. You also don't get competition for spare parts so who knows if the price will be reasonable in the future.

Isn't it pretty similar for any regular railway? Sure the physical track might be more standard, but that's not where the expense comes in, it's the signalling system, the trains, and especially the interface between the two - and that's all going to be the same either way.

It's arguable for modern rapid transit signalling systems, because those tend to be a bit more bespoke than mainline railway systems and you might not be able to switch to a different supplier without swapping out all the interlockings, and the trackside and train-borne equipment in one go, but for the trains I don't follow your point – switching manufacturers when ordering the next generation of trains is par for the course, and having the signalling system of your choice plugged into the train of your choice is standard procedure even on rapid transit and light rail systems.

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.

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...

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".

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

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.

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

An elephant once fell out of it and survived.

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.

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.

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.

> but you could (at much increased weight) put wheels on both the top and bottom of the carriage and have a transition point.

A fictional example of this is the monorail on the Half-Life games, which transitions between straddle-beam and suspended.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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-...

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.

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

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

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.

> 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...

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Yep. Resident Advisor just wrote a long article about it

https://ra.co/features/4444

Bit of an HDR vibe going on in the photos.

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

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.

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

Now imagine that same street filled with streetcars, or even more buses, to carry the same amount of passengers in the same time...

So what? And for how long?

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.

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...]

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.

> 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.

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

Furthermore: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milchversorgung_Rheinland

cf.: https://duckduckgo.com/q=tuffi+milch&ia=images&iax=images

Muuuh...äh...Tröööt!

More like “heavens to Wupper”

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…

> 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)" ?

From what I saw they had those, but were in too much of a hurry to do it properly because they waited until 10m before line start to do them?

I read it that way also, a failure to proritise what should be mandated safety checks prior to delaring the line open for use, caused by a cascading chain of jamming too much work into too short a shift.

My father had many stints on many mine sites as a leading foreman in charge of shift workers and yard crews .. it's been Occ Health and Safety protocol since the 1970s (in Australia at least) to post game events that result in death, injury, or even a near miss in order to adapt procedures to minimise similar things happening again.

As I read it, at the time of this accident they hadn't gotten to the stage of mandated safety checks and trial runs prior to live runs.

Incidents like these are why many workplaces have check lists and strict protocols.

The working at night part is largely irrelevant to the actual accident, in this part of the world we run the longest heaviest trains in the world 24/7/365 largely fatal accident free and have dedicated safety officers looking out around the clock.

My company tracks near misses with that same progams. That is any situation where someone could have got hurt but by luck either nobody was there when the accident hapyened or someone noticed something that is wasn't procedure to look for.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com