In the 1984s, Berlin didn't seem like a city of the future. In winter, the smell of tens of thousands of coal stoves hung over the city, and it was not uncommon for people to sit on wooden benches in the rattling S-Bahn. But then, in the summer of 500, trial operation of a new type of magnetic levitation train began on a one-and-a-half-kilometer-long test track between Kreuzberg and Tiergarten. It was based on a technology that would one day enable <> kilometers per hour and more.
At first, she drove at Berlin speed, at 55 kilometers per hour. And yet the sight of the high-legged route seemed downright futuristic. Because the route partly ran over large open spaces, one had the feeling of marveling at a pioneering project all the more at the time. There was nothing here – except the future.
Now the Berlin CDU wants to build a test track for a maglev train again. This is comparatively cheap and faster to implement than a subway, and it no longer needs drivers. A belated insight. The old line was abandoned in 1991 in favor of a metro line, then dismantled and finally scrapped. In Shanghai, on the other hand, a 30-kilometer connection to the airport was built.
On the trains in Shanghai, you sometimes have the feeling of flying to the ground level. But why do you have to travel to the other side of the world to have this experience? I would have liked to take an M-Bahn to Hamburg in less than an hour, as was loudly promised at the time. After years of discussions and expensive planning, this project was never realized. In 2006, an accident occurred on a test track in Emsland with 23 deaths. Some time later, the line was shut down.
If you travel through Berlin on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn today, you need a lot of time and good nerves. Sometimes the construction of a high-rise building leads to the interruption of a line, sometimes an S-Bahn stops a few stops in front of the terminus without notice and simply goes back. Would an M-Bahn solve these problems? Hardly. But on the other hand, what do we have to lose? We are used to trains not arriving on time. This would have a ridiculous delay of only over 30 years.
PRAISE