A Transit Buff's Tour of Germany
and Austria in 1972 (Part 1)

Introduction

In fall 1972, when I was a college sophomore, I took part in one of my college's study-abroad programs, in Hamburg, Germany. After classes ended in November, I spent a few weeks traveling through Germany and Austria before returning home in time for Christmas.

At this time, the decline of the streetcar in North America had just about reached its lowest point, and the modern light-rail renaissance had not yet begun. The only systems that I had visited so far were Cleveland (Shaker Heights), Pittsburgh and Toronto. I was looking forward to sampling the variety of electric transit systems in Germany, and I wasn't disappointed.

Color film was expensive for me at the time, so most of my photography was in black and white. On this trip, about half of my film was color, in the form of Agfachrome slide film. I used it more for normal tourist-type pictures than for streetcars, but I did manage to get one or two color pictures in most cities that I visited, and most of those pictures are here.

Scanning these 35-year-old slides was a bit of a challenge, because their color balance has shifted towards blue (or maybe Agfachrome just tends to scan that way), and some of them were underexposed to begin with. The generally overcast fall and and early winter weather didn't help, either. I had to do a lot of tweaking in Photoshop to make them presentable. So don't expect these pictures to have the same technical quality as most of the other pictures on this site.

Unfortunately, all my pictures of the fascinating interlinked systems in the Ruhrgebiet were in black and white. Maybe sometime I'll try to scan some of those negatives.

Hamburg

[picture] Students in the study-abroad program lived with families scattered around Hamburg, and had to commute to class via public transport. My hosts lived near the Wellingsbüttel S-Bahn station, near the northern end of route S1, so this was my "home station."

[picture] Sometimes, depending on where I was heading, I transferred to U-Bahn route U1 at Ohlsdorf.

[picture] Hamburg had decided to eliminate its streetcars, and the system had shrunk to a handful of lines. Here is route 1 at the elevated Landungsbrücken U-Bahn station at the harbor. Hamburg's streetcars dated from the early 1950s and had a distinctive angled-snout design that I did not see anywhere else in Germany. They also used trolley poles instead of pantographs, which was very unusual for Germany.

[picture] Streetcar routes 2 and 14 meet at Berliner Tor (I think).

[picture] One day, as I was passing through the main railroad station, the Hauptbahnhof, I saw a crowd of people on a platform waiting for a train to Dresden (which was then in East Germany). I decided to wait a few minutes to watch, and was delighted when a steam locomotive pulled in at the head of the train. The East German Reichsbahn continued to use steam power for many years after the West German Bundesbahn had given it up.