Brian Melican explores the complexity of Berlin’s U-Bahn…
As hard as it may be for those who come into daily contact with BVG to believe, Germany is envied, in the wider world, for its efficiently-run and tightly-woven networks of public transport. Among mass-transit professionals, Berlin especially is considered to have an almost text-book urban rail infrastructure.
The city’s S-Bahn, for instance, offers a comparatively rare degree of completion in the shape of a periphery circular line criss-crossed by north-south and east-west connections—the sort of journey-time cutting infrastructure Paris spent much of the late-twentieth century acquiring and which London, in the form of the Overground and delayed Crossrail, is still struggling to get operational.
Yet when it comes to beautiful, rational rail simplicity, Berlin’s S-Bahn is not matched by its U-Bahn. Although it is German-speaking Europe’s largest metro and very much part of the fabric of the city, the Berlin U-Bahn has a very different and altogether more complicated history than its heavy-rail counterpart.
Where the S-Bahn was planned and built in a systematic manner, with most of its current network in place prior even to the First World War—and, importantly, far before the destruction of the Second World War and the difficulties of division—the U-Bahn was a later and much more piecemeal affair whose development was curtailed by the post-war borders. At a time when other German cities such as Munich and Frankfurt were receiving entire new underground networks, Berlin’s U-Bahn was subject to a prolonged period of bonsai-like pruning from whose constraints it is only now beginning to escape.
This makes for some frustrating gaps in underground coverage, primarily in the former East and especially in terms of connections between outlying areas once divided by the Wall. Where the pre-existing S-Bahn circular and cross-town lines were simply reactivated after unification, by 1989 whole U-Bahn lines had been built to not cross between east and west. Yet it is precisely this troubled history makes the U-Bahn a rich well of Berlin history—and one that is still very much a part of its present.
“Hoch- und Untergrundbahn” – The beginnings of the Berlin U-Bahn
While the S-Bahn ring was built around the city on what was greenfield land in the 1870s and the cross-town Stadtbahn was already rumbling along its iconic brick arches by 1882, Berlin’s first metro line was not opened until 1902. It was, in contrast to the S-Bahn, an attempt to tackle increasing traffic congestion within the city centre rather than a way of transporting people through it.
Running from what is today Ersnt-Reuter-Platz and was back then called Knie (“Knee”) through to Warschauer Brücke (today Warschauer Straße), much of this first line was built overground: from Gleisdreieck to Warschauer Straße, the current U1 uses the same metal viaducts that carried this first line; west of Gleisdreieck, the original route went underground under Nollendorfplatz and Zoo – and is today served by the U2.
This is important because it sheds light on common question which both newcomers and natives in Germany often ask themselves in their idle hours: why is the U-Bahn – Untergrundbahn – called the U-Bahn when so much of it runs not just above, but indeed several storeys overground? In Hamburg, for instance, whose U-Bahn was also begun in the early twentieth-century, whole sections of the original line run…