American Reacts To Suspension Railway In Wuppertal Story Of A Landmark

Look James Bray, he make a Video in this train.and was so happy about it.

I think you should balance the audio , the og video is way louder than your voice. At times i need auto subs for you because you are to quite.

No traffic jam depended = faster then piblic bus or ordinary tram.

I lived for 27 years in Wuppertal and used the Schwebebahn multiple times a day.
You just need to go to a station and jump in, as the "train" is sheduled to come every 3 (!) minutes! So no long waiting time for a ride! 🙂
And it's really fast as you don't have traffic jams, lights, busy roads, etc. So you are much (!) faster than driving by car or bus.
And it's cheap!
You can buy a city ticket for around 80 bucks and then use all public transportations (bus, train, Schwebebahn) in town for a whole month.
It's really worth the money, if you use if frequently or daily… 🙂

As a Wuppertal citizen since birth, I'm very familiar with the Schwebebahn, and both the history and the theory about it are awesome, BUT this video neglects a lot of the practical issues, making it look like an overly positive thing, beloved by everyone. Unfortunately due to the city being basically bankrupt for decades, they made some questionable decisions with who they hired to build the new wagons and the replaced rails and stations.
As you get what you pay for, there are frequent issues with the software of the wagons. The end station in Oberbarmen also frequently having issues with the railway switch and other such silly things, that it didn't have before the reconstruction.
All this results in the Schwebebahn being inoperable quite a few times in the past few years, sometimes for days or weeks, sometimes months at a time.
Also saying that the trains are running quietly…maybe on the inside, on the outside, you hear it pretty far, especially at the end stations, as they turn around. Always wondered if the flats in Vohwinkel, the part of the city, where the Schwebebahn isn't going over the river but over the main street in between normal residential houses, were cheaper because every few minutes a train goes by.
And then there is the issue of the stations being "barrier free". Which they are, technically, due to having ONE elevator per side. If those aren't broken, as they tend to be, again sometimes for weeks at a time.

Summary: Great idea, but nowhere near as beloved and great as shown due to the city being unable and unwilling to invest more than the bare minimum, while being willing to push billions into trying to get a federal expo about gardens into the city for 2031, that will cost the city more than it will gain from it.

Dont worry, they kept the old ones. Germans probably already have a museum location or a place they have sold it too. (Sinnsheim technik). Etc.

"Einmal im Leben durch Wuppertal schweben" 😃

Would more translate to soaring railway.

Fun Fact : There was only one severe accident in the 100 Years of usage , during mainentance workers forget to remove one clamb on the rails and that resulted to a de railing and the waggon fall into the River . Built it this way was expensive but the City had no other choice , Wuppertal is in a Valley and there was no / little space left = they built most part of the railways over the River , high enough that smal Vessel still could use the river. Till today its the most secure way to use public transport

Schweben means to float/levitate, so Schwebebahn means "floating train". In Wuppertal there are two things coming together, the geographical and geological situation of the valley with Wuppertal being a narrow but long city calling for a train as transportation and the fact that the region around Wuppertal was germany's hotspot for Iron and Steel casting and manufacturing. The tech it self is supercool and one might ask why it didn't became a popular solution for other cities, well because it is expensive and needs a lot o logistics to transport all that steel, but since Wuppertal already had all that steel, and the geopraphical situation called for it, it was a no-brainer…
Also the Schwebewbahn was the prototype, the first of it's kind, and it's engineering until this day seems like science-fiction and modern technology, it's hard to believe it's from the emporer's time…