Marina Manoukian on the chequered history of Berlin’s tram network…
The oldest tram stop in Berlin lies at Am Kupfergraben, in the center of the city close to the Museum Island and the German History Museum. It was created in 1865, the same year Berlin’s horse-drawn tram network came to life—the oldest such system in the world and the one that formed the basis for the city’s current tram network, which in turn is the longest in the world, with up to 190 kilometres of track, over 800 stops, and more planned for the 21st century.
As effective as the horse-drawn trams were, they consumed huge amounts of water and oats and left an even larger amount of waste behind them. The first electric tram went into operation on May 16th 1881: invented by Werner von Siemens, it was initially used to ferry passengers between Berlin and Lichterfelde, which at the time was an independent town, and ultimately signed the death warrant for its horse-drawn predecessors, the last of which operated on August 28th, 1908.
Not only were electric trams considered more reliable, they were also faster, running at around 20 kilometers per hour. But the life of a nineteenth-century tram worker was not an easy one. For many years, drivers worked without any cover in all kinds of weather, the rationale being that they could warn pedestrians that may be in the way; it wasn’t until the 1920s that the driver’s seat was closed off and protected from the elements, and it also took almost 20 years from the system’s inauguration before tram workers got benefits such as social insurance, medical coverage, and pensions.
The latter only occurred after a great strike in 1900 when, despite tram customers supporting tram workers’ demands for higher wages and better working conditions, Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to send in troops, demanding at least 500 casualties: “a demand so outrageous that it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone to act on it,” according to the London Review of Books.
In 1925, Vladmir Nabakov declared in his ‘Guide to Berlin’ that “the streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished. Already I feel it has an air of antiquity, a kind of old-fashioned charm”. He was wrong; by the turn of the twentieth century, almost 400 kilometers of tram tracks were already laid and at least 20 different tramway companies competed for passengers. Then again, by the end of World War Two the major infrastructural progress the city had made was in ruins, with roughly 75% of trams damaged and 95% of the overhead cables destroyed.
It was the Soviets who got the tram up and running again, and for a short amount of time the lines bore names with Latin and Cyrillic letters. This, somewhat unwittingly, harkened back to the early days of the tramway—the first numbering schemes for trams came into play in 1902 and was rather messy, with single digits designated for ring lines, double digits for lines in eastern Berlin, and a mix of letters and numerals in the west; this slightly confusing system was dispensed with when the Große Berliner Straßenbahn (GBS) merged all the tram companies in 1920.
When Berlin was divided, the tramway was also split in twain. The West side was managed by BVG-West…