Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Wagon hoists

Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds

The centrepiece of Leeds’ Wellington Place development is called Tower Square, because its unlikely landmark is a rare survival of Victorian railway technology, one of a pair of towers that housed hoists to move freight wagons up and down between the now-demolished viaduct approaching Central Station and ground level.

Built in 1850, the Leeds Central Wagon Hoist is now celebrated. Thanks to the developer MEPC investing £1.5 million the derelict Grade II listed rarity has been turned into a free-entry mini-museum which tells the story of the defunct railway line and the vanished passenger station that closed in 1967.

This Yorkshire Post feature illustrates how much the site has changed – Leeds Central Station: What remains of Leeds city centre’s ‘other’ train station (yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk) – and the attractive displays inside the tower are enlivened with a soundscape of departure announcements and passing trains.

As far as I can discover, there are only two other surviving wagon hoists in Britain.

One is easily viewed from Platform 8 of Huddersfield railway station. Attached to the Grade II listed goods warehouse dating from 1885, this hoist is supported by cast-iron Doric columns and it seems that the lifting equipment remains. An urban-explorer report dated 2015 shows the spacious empty interior but the photographer either couldn’t find or didn’t recognise the interest of the hoist: Report – – LNWR/LYR Goods Warehouse, Huddersfield – April 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk.

The other, also listed Grade II, is at Goole in East Yorkshire: Coal Wagon Hoist, Railway Dock © David Dixon :: Geograph Britain and Ireland.

There are archive images of other wagon-hoists, no longer in existence, at –

The only moving-image footage I can find to show a wagon-hoist in action is a twenty-second clip in a documentary about freight transport in Sheffield: Sheffields railway in the 60`s – YouTube (start at 5:12). This footage, apparently dated 1966, lacks a title or credits, and explains why, with hindsight, the well-intentioned modernisation of archaic operating practices didn’t stand the test of time. Railway goods sheds and stations aren’t given as much attention as passenger stations, civil engineering works and rolling stock, but they are amply covered in John Minnis and Simon Hickman’s The Railway Goods Shed and Warehouse in England (Historic England 2016), free to download at Goods Sheds 140pp.indd (historicengland.org.uk).

Leeds’ secret garden

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After a day out in Manchester where we enjoyed the Castlefield Viaduct high-line garden, my friend Ann and I decided to take a day-trip to Leeds to look at the Monk Bridge Viaduct, which turns out to be a closely-guarded secret.

It’s remarkably difficult to find: there seems to be no signage whatsoever, and street maps show where an abandoned railway crosses the River Aire but offer no indication how to approach the elevated former trackbed.

If we’d simply walked out of the station and turned left we’d have found it within a spacious housing development called The Junction. But we’re from Sheffield. How are we supposed to know?

The viaduct is worth seeking out, nevertheless, as a monument to the period when the new-fangled railways embellished their engineering with grand architectural decoration.

From 1834 onwards five separate railway companies converged on the flat land beside the River Aire as near as possible to the centre of Leeds, their approach lines criss-crossing and twisting in a cat’s-cradle over the river and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

The Midland Railway opened a terminus, Leeds Wellington Station, in 1846, while the other four companies shared a joint station, Leeds Central Station, in 1854 and built an east-west through line served by Leeds New Station in 1869 (renamed Leeds City in 1938).

In the 1960s British Railways concentrated all its passenger services in Leeds City (renamed simply Leeds) and subsequently Leeds Central was demolished and part of its viaduct approach replaced by Royal Mail House (1975 – reconstructed as West Central, 2003, and later West Point).

The surviving viaduct, including a stately bridge over the River Aire, has now become the spine of The Junction, a very smart residential development geared to people who work from home, and the former trackbed is ingeniously landscaped so that it doesn’t look like a corridor to carry railway lines.

Ann and I parked ourselves at a table in front of The Junc Shack, where a civilised queue of (presumably) residents and workers seemed content to wait for carefully prepared and courteously served food and drinks from Alfonso’s Cuban Shack, where the generously filled pastrami bagel proved to be a substitute for lunch.

On a fine day, within ten minutes’ walk of Leeds Station, The Junction is worth visiting.

If you ask the Junc Shack crew nicely, they’ll show you how to access the splendid loos.

Brunel’s starting point

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It’s one thing to learn from the standard book about a historic building, but walking round it with the author provides a different level of understanding.

Steven Brindle’s Paddington Station: its history and architecture (English Heritage 2013) in its second edition represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of one of Britain’s most important stations.

I took the opportunity to walk round the station with Steven as part of a group of Victorian Society members on a Saturday afternoon amid the hubbub of trains arriving and departing every few minutes, high-volume PA announcements, assistance trolleys conveying people up and down the platforms and noisy families taking selfies in front of the statue of Paddington Bear.

Now the second busiest station in the UK (after London Liverpool Street), Paddington Station remains a monument to the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) who was chosen to plan and build the Great Western Railway after winning the competition to design the Clifton Suspension Bridge and making himself popular with Bristol grandees for assisting in managing the chaos caused by the Reform Bill riots of 1831.

Steven made the station’s original layout clear by starting his tour halfway down Platform 1, next to Marcus Cornish’s statue of Paddington Bear.

This was the side from which the first trains departed, and the buildings planned by Brunel and designed by Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820-1877) largely survive, including the Royal Waiting Room, now the first-class lounge.

Brunel ensured that the Great Western Railway was at the forefront of Victorian technology though some of his ideas were in advance of practicality: the seven-foot broad gauge finally expired in 1892 and his atmospheric railway lasted less than a year. Nevertheless, trains still run between Paddington and the South-West as they have since 1838, from under the magnificent glazed train-shed that Brunel and Wyatt completed in 1854.

Three spans of wrought-iron arches cover the tracks, supported by columns that were originally cast iron, replaced by steel in 1922-24. The transepts which break up the vista were thought to accommodate turntable tracks for shifting early rolling stock, but thorough recent research casts doubt on this idea.

The Great Western Railway was at once innovative and conservative, so when the removal of the broad-gauge tracks made it possible to increase the number of platforms it was accomplished without compromising Brunel and Wyatt’s train shed.

I’d never fully grasped how the separation of the original four departure and arrival platforms worked until I followed Steven round and learned that Brunel’s buildings on the northern arrival side were demolished in the early twentieth century.

The north side of the station has been repeatedly altered, first with the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway terminus, tucked in the north-west corner, in 1863, then the Span Four extension (1913-14), which respectfully follows the proportions of the 1854 station, and again when new buildings were added by the company architect, Percy Emerson Culverhouse (1871-1953), in the 1930s.

In the course of its history the station has extended from four platforms to seventeen including through platforms for the Underground and the Elizabeth Line.

Steven Brindle couldn’t show us the most remarkable of his discoveries at Paddington Station, the remaining span of Brunel’s first iron bridge, over the canal at Bishop’s Bridge. The actual ironwork is in store in Fort Cumberland near Portsmouth. The story is at Bishop’s Bridge – Wikipedia.

L T C Rolt relates that at an early meeting of the Great Western Railway directors, someone cast doubts on the practicality of driving a railway all the way from London to Bristol, and Brunel replied, “Why not make it longer, and have a steamboat go from Bristol to New York and call it the Great Western?”

You can take a train from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads, passing the Wharncliffe Viaduct, the Maidenhead Bridge, Sonning Cutting, Swindon and Box Tunnel – each of them a pioneering work of genius – to visit Brunel’s surviving steamship, SS Great Britain, in the dry dock in which she was built.

He was a truly remarkable man who lived a remarkable life.

“The Pennsylvanian” – to Pittsburgh by rail

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Rather than take a humdrum flight into Pittsburgh, I travelled by rail from Philadelphia in 2017 along what’s now called the Keystone Corridor. It’s a much more meaningful experience.

The historic main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia crosses the forbidding Allegheny Mountains, passing through formerly prosperous steel towns that, when they fell on hard times, were identified as part of the Rust Belt.

Altoona, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s railway town, is still an important centre bristling with the works and sidings of the PRR’s successor, the freight operator Norfolk & Southern, and also the location of the Railroaders’ Memorial Museum.

Five miles west of Altoona lies the Horseshoe Curve, opened in 1854, a 220° curve which is so spectacular it’s a tourist attraction. The purpose-built observation park opened in 1879. On the train, the attendant alerts passengers with a PA announcement.

The Horseshoe Curve was part of a scheme to replace the Allegheny Portage Railroad, opened in 1834 to transport barges on the Pennsylvania Canal over the watershed. Unlike British canal inclines, such as Anderton and Foxton, the vessels were lifted out of the water and conveyed by rail on flat cars: Old Portage Railroad by George W. Storm – Allegheny Portage Railroad – Wikipedia. Charles Dickens described riding the Portage Railroad in American Notes for General Circulation (1842): Conquering the Alleghenies | Pennsylvania Center for the Book (psu.edu).

Johnstown has a powerful history – home of the Cambria Steel Company (founded 1852), the site of the notorious Johnstown Flood of 1889, a dam-failure which killed well over two thousand people, and the location of the Johnstown Inclined Plane of 1891, a funicular like Saltburn’s but big enough to carry a car.

Further on there are stops at Latrobe, birthplace of the banana split according to Wikipedia, and Greensburg, a coal town that seems to have reinvented itself more successfully than most, partly perhaps because it has a university campus.

Arrival in Pittsburgh is less than dignified: the two daily arrivals and two corresponding departures run into an annex beside Daniel H Burman’s magnificent Penn Station (1898-1902) which is now an apartment block.

However, a five-minute taxi transfer took me to the Omni William Penn Hotel, where I was speedily installed in a spacious and comfortable room with a vast bed, a generous bathroom and a walk-in closet (wardrobe) which could itself almost have taken a single bed.

The William Penn is an illustrious, civilised landmark in Pittsburgh, opened in 1916 by a consortium that included the much-disliked Henry Clay Frick, and host to a succession of US Presidents from Hoover onwards: https://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/pittsburgh-william-penn.

Barack Obama, apparently, was the first president to be barred from the top-floor presidential suite because his security people insist on occupying the floors above and below him.

His successor appears never to have darkened the doorstep. Perhaps he owns or leases some place else.

Foxton Inclined Plane

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Foxton Inclined Plane, Grand Union Canal, Leicestershire

Sir Edward Leader Williams’ Anderton Boat Lift (1875) in Cheshire successfully enabled canal boats to move between the River Weaver and the Trent & Mersey Canal, a vertical distance of fifty feet. Despite problems with maintenance it worked efficiently for over a century, and after a radical overhaul in 2000-02 it’s now likely to operate for another hundred years.

A completely different, less fortunate engineering solution to the same difficulty was tried in the Midlands, on the border between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire near Market Harborough.

The engineers who built the old Grand Union Canal at the beginning of the nineteenth century faced a similar situation at Foxton, where their main line climbed 75ft from a junction with a branch canal to Market Harborough up to the summit level.

The solution was a staircase of ten locks, opened in 1813, which took narrow boats forty-five minutes to travel. At the other end of the summit pound, at Watford Gap, another flight of locks dropped 54ft 1in.

In 1894 the Grand Junction Canal company amalgamated with the old Grand Union and the Leicestershire & Northamptonshire canals to operate the trunk route between Leicestershire and London as a single entity.

It still seemed practical at the end of the nineteenth century to compete with the railways for bulk, non-urgent freight traffic, using broad barges, provided the bottlenecks at the narrow locks at Foxton and Watford were eliminated.

The Grand Junction engineer Gordon Cale Thomas devised and patented a steam-powered lift that drew tanks, called caissons, laterally up a ramp between the top and bottom of the old locks: Foxton Inclined Plane – Foxton Inclined Plane – Wikipedia.

This device, which opened in 1900, had numerous advantages: each caisson could carry two wide barges between the two levels in twelve minutes and, whereas canal locks lose a lockful of water whenever a boat passes up or down, the lift lost hardly any water at all.

The disadvantages were that the winding engines had to be kept constantly in steam whether there was traffic or not, and there turned out to be insufficient traffic to justify the ongoing cost.

Perversely, the canal company chose to rebuild the Watford locks as narrow locks, simply moving the bottleneck further south and leaving the Foxton incline underused. A boat lift at Watford would have speeded up traffic dramatically, and may have yielded better cost benefits.

Because the main carrier, Fellows Morton & Clayton, demanded twenty-four-hour working, Foxton Locks was rebuilt, also as narrow locks, in 1909 and the incline was mothballed after ten years. It was used intermittently when the locks needed repair until it was scrapped in 1928.

Its site was abandoned for nearly half a century until it was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1973, and the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust was founded in 1980.

Nowadays the site of the ramp is cleared and the scale of this sophisticated piece of Victorian canal engineering is apparent to visitors. The reconstructed boiler-house is a museum which explains the vanished incline and the Trust intends eventually to restore the lift.

It won’t happen any time soon, but the Trust is actively curating the site and maintaining public awareness of a fascinating corner of the canal network: https://www.fipt.org.uk/copy-of-about-fipt.

Anderton Boat Lift

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In the early 1970s, the time when I learnt about industrial archaeology from the Arkwright Society based in Cromford, there was a sense of urgency about witnessing, if not safeguarding, relics of the Industrial Revolution that were deteriorating and going out of use.

The Arkwright Society had among its members Leslie Bradley (1902-2004), formerly headmaster of Derby School from 1942 to 1961, who led a succession of canal day-trips which were themselves an education. Leslie knew his way around the canal system because he had, like Tom Rolt, converted a narrow boat to a leisure craft before many other people took to the idea.

In 1973 Leslie ran a trip including potentially a last chance to experience taking a boat through the Anderton Boat Lift. This unique survivor was built in 1875, rebuilt in 1906-08, and was clearly nearing the end of its useful life.

It was built to provide a more efficient link between the Weaver Navigation which served the Cheshire salt beds and the Trent & Mersey Canal, which connected with the industrial heart of the Midlands and the waterways of northern England.

The Lift replaced the collection of chutes, cranes and inclined planes dating from the end of the eighteenth century that transhipped freight up and down the fifty-foot vertical distance between the two waterways.

It was designed by Sir Edward Leader Williams (1828-1901), the chief engineer of the North Staffordshire Railway which owned the Trent & Mersey Canal, as a development of the lifts designed by James Green (1781-1849) for the Grand Western Canal in Devon. Sir Edward proposed an iron tower containing two caissons, side by side, to lift and lower floating narrow boats, powered by hydraulic rams assisted when necessary by a steam engine.

The Weaver Navigation Act (1872) empowered the river trustees to construct the lift, which opened to canal traffic on July 26th 1875. Boats gain access from the river at the base of the lift which stands on an island in the middle of the river, like Williams’ later Barton Swing Aqueduct (1893). At the top of the structure an iron aqueduct leads vessels into the canal on its embankment.

The polluted canal water that powered the hydraulics repeatedly caused difficulties with the machinery over the following three decades. The trustees were advised by their engineer Colonel John Arthur Saner (1864-1952) to install a system of electric motors and counterweights which would be cheaper and easier to maintain and had the advantage that the caissons could operate independently rather than in tandem. However, the full 252-ton weight of the water-filled caissons was no longer cushioned by the rams, so Colonel Saner reinforced the structure with steel A-girders to support pulleys that led the wire ropes which bore the load.

The conversion from hydraulic to electric power took place within two years, 1906-08, and operated efficiently until the 1970s, despite increasing doubts about the effect of atmospheric pollution on the integrity of the structure. A 1983 inspection revealed such severe corrosion that the Lift was closed immediately.

Fortunately, it had been listed as a Scheduled Monument in 1976, so there was no likelihood it would be dismantled, but it stood idle until an admirable £7,000,000 restoration programme brought it back to life in 2000-02.

The Lift is now once more hydraulic-powered using oil, and the redundant A-frames and pulleys remain to show how the structure looked for most of its working life. The heavy counterweights were not replaced, and now form a maze in the grounds of the two-storey visitor centre.

Now the traffic is no longer salt but people – leisure boaters and day visitors.

I’m glad to think that Leslie Bradley lived long enough to know of the restoration. It was industrial-archaeology pioneers like him who helped to save for future generations a priceless legacy of mementos of British industrial genius.

Destination station

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The Schlesisches Tor station on Berlin’s U1 elevated railway is spectacular – much more than a place to catch a train.

It formed part of Berlin’s first overground electric rail service, built to the designs of the architects Hans Grisebach (1848-1904) and Georg Dinklage (1849-1926) by the construction company Siemens & Halske, pioneers of electric traction. Heinrich Giesecke (1862-1937) was responsible for the architectural decoration which included elaborately carved stonework, wrought-ironwork and an onion-dome turret.

Its opulent historicist style gave it prestige, and the street-level facilities were generous – several shops, including a pastry shop, and a restaurant named Torkrug.

Named after a former entrance to the city, the Silesian Gate, it was opened in 1902.

It suffered a direct hit in an Allied air raid on March 11th-12th 1945, but services continued until the power supply failed, putting the entire network out of action on April 22nd.

For a time after the end of the War Schlesisches Tor became a terminus until the through service was restored in April 1947. It was interrupted again, briefly during an uprising in 1953, and ultimately when the Berlin Wall divided the city in 1961. The through service was eventually reopened in 1995.

Even before reunification the station was recognised as a historic monument. The former restaurant was occupied by a retail store, the Kaufhaus am Tor (commonly shortened to Kato). The name Kato was perpetuated by a club which took over the space after 1981. From 2012 Kato was succeeded by a night-club, Bi Nuu.

The station was listed in 1980 and renovated for the International Building Exhibition in 1984 and the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin in 1987.

A commemorative plaque honours Alfred Flatow (1869-1942), a Jewish gymnast who won three gold and one silver medals in the 1896 Olympic Games. He and his colleagues were suspended by the national gymnastics governing body Deutsche Turnerschaft which regarded the Games as “unGerman”. Alfred and his cousin Gustav (1875-1945), who himself won two gold medals in 1896, were among the founders of the Judische Turnerschaft in 1903. Both perished in the Holocaust – Alfred at the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp and Gustav in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

Both cousins are commemorated in the naming of the Flatow-Sporthalle nearby, the renaming of the Reichssportsfeld Strasse [street of the National Sports Complex] as Flatowallee [Flatow Boulevard]. They are also illustrated on one of a set of four stamps issued by Deutsche Post to celebrate the centenary of the 1896 Olympic Games.

The little railway with the long name

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Matlock Railway Station, Derbyshire (1977)

Matlock Railway Station, Derbyshire (2016)

Though I’ve driven from home in Sheffield to Matlock more times than I can number, on a whim I decided to travel by train when I needed to visit the Derbyshire Record Office recently.

I told myself it’s difficult to park in Matlock during the day, but actually I like riding on trains and if you’re a certain age you can get a Derbyshire Wayfarer ticket that lasts all day and costs only £7.70: Derbyshire Wayfarer | National Rail.

It’s a very long time since I set off northwards out of Derby on a train that takes the left branch at Ambergate Junction and stops at the sad little platform which is all that’s left of the triangular Ambergate station.

While passengers climb aboard the driver unlocks the signalling for the line up to Matlock, which is a fascinating piece of transport history as well as an enjoyable piece of Derbyshire countryside.

There’s a point shortly before Whatstandwell station where the Derwent valley narrows so that the Cromford Canal, the railway, the A6 trunk road and the river are practically side by side.

Further north, canal, river and railway change places as the railway plunges through Leawood Tunnel (309 yards) while the canal follows the contour to cross the river at the Wigwell Aqueduct.

The next station, Cromford, is exceptionally pretty. An expensive essay in French chateau style, it was designed by George Henry Stokes (1826-1876), who had married Emily, daughter of Sir Joseph Paxton, the Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, designer of the Crystal Palace and a director of the Ambergate-Rowsley railway. The up waiting room is a self-catering holiday let: The Waiting Room Holiday Cottage – Cromford – Railway Station Cottages.

At the north end of the Cromford platform the line enters Willersley Tunnel (765 yards) and emerges at the approach to the Swiss-style Matlock Bath station.

The stretch north of Matlock Bath was much more fun when diesel railcars allowed you to look forward over the driver’s shoulder. There are two tunnels, High Tor No 1 (321 yards) and High Tor No 2 (379 yards), separated by a flash of daylight and a glimpse of the River Derwent. If you blink you miss it.

You can, thanks to years of effort by volunteers, now cross platforms at Matlock and carry on to Rowsley when the Peakrail service is running.

Taking the train from Sheffield to Matlock via Derby is potentially quicker (under 1¼ hours) than the X17 bus service (just over 1½ hours) – and less effort than driving.

Triangular station

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I remember Ambergate station in the 1960s when it had six platforms, though not all of them were in use. Indeed, I photographed it by chance while on a bike ride when I was sixteen [Buyers’ remorse: British Railways Class 17 | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times], and I went back a couple of years later when a sunset provided appropriate lighting for a station in rapid decline.

In 1972-73 I was coming to the end of my time teaching at Bilborough Grammar School in Nottingham and beginning a long career of part-time adult-education lecturing for the University of Nottingham.

Through that winter and spring I left school promptly, took a bus to Nottingham station and caught a diesel rail-set that trundled over some of the oldest railway lines in the north Midlands – the original Midland Counties Railway (1839) to Derby, then north over the North Midland Railway (1840) to Ambergate, and from there on the little railway with the long name, the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock & Midland Junction Railway (1849) to Matlock.

The ponderous title of the company indicates an intention to connect the East Midlands with Manchester, but it only reached Rowsley on the doorstep of two ducal estates before running out of cash in 1849.

The title also indicates that the three railways which met at Derby had amalgamated in 1844 as the Midland Railway.

In the midst of the frantic competition between railway companies after the investment bubble known as the “Railway Mania”, the MBM&MJR became jointly leased by the Midland and its rival, the London & North Western Railway, which operated what we now call the West Coast Main Line from London to Scotland.

The L&NWR gave up its share of the lease after the Midland gained powers to build a competing line from its branch to Wirksworth.

Eventually, after the 6th Duke of Devonshire died and his successor didn’t want a railway running through his Chatsworth estate, the 8th Duke of Rutland was persuaded to allow a line tunnelling behind the back garden of Haddon Hall, and the railway was extended from Rowsley up the Wye Valley, first to New Mills and eventually on to Manchester.

The southern “Midland Junction” at Ambergate developed, in fits and starts, into a key connection for trains between Derby, Manchester and Sheffield.

An informative Wikipedia map [Ambergate junction – Ambergate railway station – Wikipedia] shows how the 1849 junction was west-to-north, and the south/north-west link was opened later, in 1863. A further south/north-east link, to allow expresses to overtake stopping trains, followed in 1876.

Another service began in 1875, providing passenger trains to Pye Bridge on the Erewash Valley line, part of which now operates as a heritage railway, Midland Railway (Butterley). (The MBM&MJRroute north of Matlock to south of Rowsley is also a heritage line, Peakrail.)

In the course of the nineteenth-century operational changes the station buildings were shifted around, until the triangular junction was provided with six platforms on a high embankment. The buildings were, of necessity, constructed of timber.

The station remained intact until all passenger services except the shuttle service to Matlock ended in 1968. Then, in 1970, the redundant platforms and all the timber buildings were taken down, and Ambergate passengers wait on the former up platform with the benefit of a bus shelter.

Ambergate had, along with Queensbury (closed 1955) and Shipley in West Yorkshire and Earlestown in Lancashire, the distinction of being a triangular station with six platforms.

The prettiest bridge in Berlin

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Oberbaumbrücke, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Berlin

The Oberbaum Bridge [Oberbaumbrücke], which links two Berlin suburbs, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, across the River Spree, is engagingly weird.

Lonely Planet describes it as “Berlin’s prettiest bridge”, while the Berlin Historical Walks website suggests “its strutting proud form reflects the confidence and swagger” of imperial Germany.

In fact, its chequered history touches every aspect of the growth and resilience of this fascinating city.

The crossing was established at the boundary of early eighteenth-century Berlin as part of a customs wall to collect tolls. The name literally translates as “Upper beam bridge”, indicating the tree-trunk barrier that was lowered overnight to discourage smugglers. There was a lower (ie, downstream) beam at Unterbaumstraße.

The original wooden bridge was replaced by the present brick, double-deck structure in 1894-96, to overcome a bottleneck for road vehicles and pedestrians and to accommodate elevated tracks for the city’s first subway trains. Services on the U-bahn from Stralauer Tor on the eastern side of the bridge to Potsdamer Platz began in 1902.

To mask the bare structure the architect Otto Stahn (1859–1930) dressed it in the distinctive Brick Gothic style, with two entirely decorative towers flanking the central span, indicating that this had been a historic gate into the city.

In the final weeks of the Second World War the Wehrmacht blew up the central section in a vain attempt to impede the advancing Red Army, and Allied air raids damaged the Stralauer Tor station so severely that it was never rebuilt.

The Oberbaumbrücke came to symbolise the division of Berlin, first into four sectors administered by the Allies, and then into the two separate enclaves of East and West Berlin.

In the early post-war years West Berliners could exercise the right to travel across to the East, but East Berliners were strictly forbidden to set foot on the bridge, and the U-bahn service was cut back to Schlesisches Tor in West Berlin.

The boundary between East and West was the western bank of the Spree, so the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 turned the river waters into no-man’s land.

On October 5th 1961 25-year-old Udo Düllick got himself sacked by his East German Railways [Deutsche Reichsbahn] supervisor, took a taxi to the Oberbaumbrücke and tried to swim across the river to reunite with his older brother in West Germany. The East German guards fired warning shots and then took direct aim. West Berliners watching daren’t enter the water to rescue him for fear of being shot themselves.

The East Germans failed to hit Düllick but he drowned and his body was recovered from the west bank the following day. 2,500 people attended his funeral. He was the first, but by no means the last, to die in the waters of the Spree at this place.

A permanent arrangement to open the bridge for pedestrians was agreed in 1972, and three years later a formal emergency plan to rescue people – often children who climbed through gaps in the parapet – from the river waters.

The Oberbaumbrücke came to symbolise the sadness and separation of the city’s inhabitants. The subway viaduct was partly dismantled and the ornamental towers were demolished in 1974.

The reunification of Germany in 1990 has been celebrated by the restoration of the crossing.

The gap in the viaduct was filled by a tactful, elegant steel structure by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava (b1951), and the distinctive towers were rebuilt. The bridge reopened to pedestrians and motor traffic in 1994 on the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, and the U-bahn service was restored to Warschauer Straße station the following year.

Now the Oberbaumbrüke is a celebrated tourist spot in its own right, enjoyed and loved by Berliners and foreigners alike.

The pedestrian walk beneath the U-bahn tracks is remarkable: it was designed as a prestige project by Otto Stahn in medieval style, with castellated towers, gothic arches, polychrome brick, heraldry – very St Pancras.

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