Berlin's tram network

This Christmas my wife and I booked a semi-spontaneous trip to Berlin, Germany for a few days. Our trip included visiting the typical Christmas markets, restaurants, East Side Gallery, and Museum Island. Most of our traveling around the city was done through the public tram network, with the occasional use of the U or S-Bahn. A line from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1925 short story, A Guide to Berlin, comes to mind.

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.

Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian expat, poet, and novelist living in Berlin who later moved to the United States. A Guide to Berlin, and his many other writings, have been analysed to bits¹ by academics already but I’ll be pulling out quotes from the section titled The Streetcar given our recent excursion.

A quick trip to the past

Berlin has used horse tramways since the 1860s, where a horse pulls a carriage on rails, an improvement over the horsebus, a horse-drawn carriage on wheels. I can only imagine that the rails provided a slightly smoother ride than rolling on cobbled streets, but also maybe an easier ride for the horse, requiring less energy, given the lower resistance of the rails. In 1881, the world’s first public electric tram was introduced from Berlin to Groß-Lighterfelde. The tram was built by Werner von Siemens² and used current collected from the rails. Not the safest choice of power delivery, given that the tramways were also used by other modes of transport as well. After much experimentation in the 1890s, the bow pantograph, invented by Walter Reichel³ at Siemens & Halske, was used with overhead lines.

Nabokov mentions in his writing, “If a curve is taken a little too fast and the trolley pole jumps the wire, and the conductor, or even one of the passengers, leans out over the car’s stern, looks up, and jiggles the cord until the pole is back in place.” I guess the technology, while rather impressive for the time, still needed some improvements.

Many tram companies were set up to jump on the budding opportunity to move people around Berlin. In what I can assume was a move to remain relevant, the Große Berliner Pferde-Eisenbahn (Great Berlin Horse Railway) renamed itself to Große Berliner Straßenbahn (Great Berlin Tramway), also known as GBS. They then began acquiring other tram companies throughout the years. Wikipedia has a table that lists the tram companies, on which lines they operated, when they were acquired, and by whom. By 1929, all bus, rail, and tramways were now operated by a state-owned entity, Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (Berlin Transport Company), BVG, which is still the case today.

If you’d like to imagine what the ride in one of these trams was like, Nabokov describes it in much detail, “And all the time the car sways, passengers standing in the aisle grab at the overhead straps and surge back and forth.” Shaky.

Only 15 years after that was written, World War II began and between 1944 and 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, a lot of the city was carpet-bombed. The year 1945 also brought the end of the war and with it the division of Germany and Berlin. The Berlin Transport Company, much like many organisations, split into two entities, one for the West and the other for the East.

West Berlin sought to rid the city of tramways in favour of busses and the underground metro. The Berlin Wall - A multimedia history, hosted by rbb, documents the final tram journey in West Berlin on 2nd October 1967 with an interview from Bruno Kutz, an Electrician and Tram Enthusiast, who says, “After the wall went up in ‘61, the trams started to die out pretty quickly… I just couldn’t believe that a big city like Berlin had decided to get rid of its entire tram network.” East Berlin, on the other hand, not only kept the tram lines in place but worked on extensions to them. Add another 10 years to the 20 years that Nabokov predicted it would take for the streetcar to disappear and limit that to West Berlin, and we could say he was right.

Modern day

The divide in the tram network is still visible today, 34 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The red line roughly represents the separation between East and West Berlin drawn while referring to the Berlin Wall Map. The blue lines represent the tram network taken from OpenStreetMap.

Today, 15 tram lines run during the day, and 9 aptly named MetroTram lines which run around the clock and more frequently, in some cases, 3-7 minutes between trams.

Nabokov recounts in his guide, “In these winter days, the bottom half of the forward door is curtained with green cloth, the windows are clouded with frost, Christmas trees for sale throng the edge of the sidewalk at each stop, the passengers’ feet are numb with cold.” I can report the modern trams were sufficiently warm and did provide a good way to see the eastern parts of the city.

Trams in Berlin today consist of two main rolling stock: Düwag GT6N and the Bombardier Flexity. Düwag, a German rail vehicle manufacturer which was acquired by Siemens in 1999, delivered the GT6N between 1992 and 2003 to BVG. These trams were then modernised in the 2010s around the same time the decision was made to purchase Bombardier’s Flexity low-floor trams. The Flexity trams, when delivered, replaced older rolling stock and are the most common trams you’ll encounter in Berlin.

Tickets for the public transport can be purchased via the BVG app or directly from the machines in the trams. Gone are the days of purchasing tickets from a conductor who Nabokov takes the effort to describe meticulously, from the cord jiggling to their light but rough crusty hands⁴ as they sort through change without fault on a jolty streetcar.

My wife and I were able to go most everywhere in the east through the frequent, reliable and clean trams while also not missing out on the sights of the city during Christmas. Would definitely recommend!