Ghost Stations

December 2, 2010 6:44 PM

Following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the rail networks of East and West Berlin were divided, necessitating the closure of a number of stations, creating ghost stations, through which West Berlin trains slowed, but did not stop. They appeared on West Berlin U-/S-Bahn maps as stations at which trains do not stop, in the case of stations lying in East Berlin through which trains passed or as out of service. The map also included some stations reachable only from East Berlin trains. The East Berlin map omitted the West Berlin lines and stations entirely.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the stations slowly reopened, starting with Jannowitzbrücke on 11 November 1989, with the Ringbahn being fully re-opened in 2002 and running in a circle in 2006. While DDR border guards had been stationed inside and the stations fell into disrepair, much remained of the stations as they were in 1961.

A somewhat grainy video of some ghost stations from the train driver's perspective.

posted by hoyland (17 comments total)

Excellent stuff. I was in Berlin in 1992, but wasn't smart enough to think about how the division affected preexisting underground connections.
posted by mollweide at 6:54 PM on December 2, 2010

As a gift from my friend in Berlin, I was given a wrinkled vinyl adhesive poster of a 1988 S- and U-Bahn map, with all the East Berlin stations marked as ones where the trains won't stop, with the exception of Friedrichstraße. It's a beautiful piece of transit mapping and would look nicer in its frame, if I could only get the wrinkles out. Great post.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:04 PM on December 2, 2010

I was there in 1990. I remember a newly-reopened station where the columns had been painted with bright new green paint directly on about a centimeter of accumulated fuzzy-wall-grunge.
posted by hexatron at 7:05 PM on December 2, 2010

I have a West Berlin transit map in my house, actually. It was a strange place to visit in 1987 as a 19 year old. I even went to the Zoo, but at the time nobody would know of the future significance of that particular train stop.

I don't remember riding any of the trains through East Berlin. I kind of wish I had.
posted by hippybear at 7:05 PM on December 2, 2010

I've had an obsession with the Cold War and specifically with divided Berlin for quite a while. At the beginning of it, I wasn't sure why I found it so interesting, but it's gradually dawned on me that 20th century Berlin perfectly illustrates the absurdity of human existence. Here was a very old city divided in two. Each side longs to be reunited with their friends and family on the other side of the wall, and yet we have armed guards that will shoot anybody that attempts to cross. Did the Grenztruppen enjoy murder? I doubt it. Did the Stasi spies feel good about playing informer? Probably not. And yet the wall stood for almost three decades.
posted by TrialByMedia at 7:15 PM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Those guys who embrace fancy-pants subway maps need to know that when there's themes of politics and war, as with what happened in WWII and the Cold War, strong emphasis on real geography is paramount. Then you can really understand each station's relevance over the decades. I searched around for a U-Bahn map overlaid on actual geography and found nothing. If you do that with a subway website, you make a contribution to the historical record... if you just make another London-underground map in Illustrator, well, Wikipedia and the steampunk crowd already got T-shirts and poster art made out of the other 37 just like it, so just put it in that bin over there.
posted by crapmatic at 7:26 PM on December 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

I, as I have said before, lived in Berlin in 1978-79, and I remember riding the trains through the "forbidden" zone. (Germans were only forbidden to get off the train, Americans were 'not supposed to' ride under the East- a rule we disobeyed freely.) When the rains would slow down, we could glimpse the dimly lit stations in the East, notable for the complete absence of people. There was a ghostly, train-of-the-damned surrealism for that part of the trip, interrupted only by the stop at Friedrichstraße, where a few Germans were permitted to enter and leave the East. (Americans, like myself, had to do it aboveground at Checkpoint Charlie.). It was possible to walk down the tunnels from Kochstraße, and access the East German military telephone main trunks just south of U-Bhf. Stadtmitte, which we (Americans) gleefully monitored for most oft the time the Wall existed. (It so happened that the actual run of the telephone trunks was in the West!

TrialbyMedia: You might be interested in my Flickr sets of cold war Berlin.
posted by pjern at 7:43 PM on December 2, 2010 [14 favorites]

I'm going to have to watch Wings of Desire again.
posted by Joe Beese at 7:45 PM on December 2, 2010

I take it that both East and West operated trains on the same tracks. How did they coordinate? (I am reminded of Mieville's The City and The City .)
posted by CCBC at 9:37 PM on December 2, 2010

pjern, did you work in intelligence? I notice your buddy has an English-Russian dictionary and a copy of "The Youth of the Land of Soviets" on his shelf.
posted by nasreddin at 9:43 PM on December 2, 2010

I was there in April 1989. I left from Frankfurt via Eurail headed to Prague to visit a pen-pal. It seemed like an adventure, going behind the Iron Curtain, for this first-time visitor to Europe. I had to disembark in Nuremberg, the last stop in West Germany and switch to a different train (I also had to purchase a ticket; my Eurail pass was not valid in East Germany or Czechoslovakia). The train I boarded in Nuremberg was like a different world in comparison to the previous train - the seats were unupholstered wooden benches and the water taps in the restrooms were marked "Water Not Potable." Petticoat Junction's "Cannonball" looked positively modern in comparison. Not to mention the fact that when we crossed over to East Germany, machine gun-toting soldiers with German shepards came aboard to inspect passports and browse through luggage. I haven't been back there since, but I'm presuming that after the Wall came down the antique train cars were retired and the modern ones were allowed past Nuremberg.
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:54 PM on December 2, 2010

No joke, in the Soviet Union we considered the DDR to be the epitome of Western elegance and luxury. Consumer products from there were very highly sought after.
posted by nasreddin at 10:12 PM on December 2, 2010

nasreddin: "pjern, did you work in intelligence? I notice your buddy has an English-Russian dictionary and a copy of "The Youth of the Land of Soviets" on his shelf"

Yep, Mike was a Russian linguist. i worked in the ELINT shop.
posted by pjern at 10:40 PM on December 2, 2010

I'm presuming that after the Wall came down the antique train cars were retired and the modern ones were allowed past Nuremberg.
correct. the DB effectively took over the DR.
posted by krautland at 4:50 AM on December 3, 2010

pjern wrote: There was a ghostly, train-of-the-damned surrealism for that part of the trip, interrupted only by the stop at Friedrichstraße, where a few Germans were permitted to enter and leave the East. (Americans, like myself, had to do it aboveground at Checkpoint Charlie.)

I too was there, in 1977. I recall having to get off the train and go through customs, where we were forced to exchange D-marks for East German marks. I can't recall the amount, but it was small, enough to buy a warm ersatz Pepsi, and take a trolley ride.

I, and my friends were stopped by 6 heavily armed VoPos who took our cameras and film when we were seen entering into the Wall Zone ( past those signs in 6 languages...) to take pictures of an abandoned subway entrance.
posted by Gungho at 6:21 AM on December 3, 2010

I grew up living in Berlin at the Northern end of the S2 (see this `84 map) which had a lot of ghost stations when driving through the center (Nordbahnhof, Oranienburger Straße, Unter den Linden, Potsdamer Platz).

They were always very scary to me as a kid as they were dusty and in disrepair. There were booths with dim light in them and Vopos and I was alsounder the impression that there were Selbstschußanlagen installed, which I understood to be rifles automatically firing when a human crossed its line of sight. This was not so but seemed utterly plausible to ten year old me.
posted by Glow Bucket at 8:15 AM on December 3, 2010

CCBC: I take it that both East and West operated trains on the same tracks. How did they coordinate? (I am reminded of Mieville's The City and The City .)

If you compare the maps, they didn't actually share track. Off the top of my head, there were stretches of S-Bahn where the tracks ran in parallel and S-Bahn stations where one set of trains stopped and the others passed. Friedrichsstraße was the only station in use in both systems, as it contained a maze-like border crossing, but I don't think there was shared track.

When I was gathering links, I came across some references to negotiations about the use of the track, but nothing in English and nothing particularly substantive. As an odd piece of trivia, Schwarzkopffstraße, was renamed from Walter-Ulbricht-Stadion to Stadion der Weltjugend (when the stadium was renamed), despite being a ghost station.
posted by hoyland at 9:08 AM on December 3, 2010