Better Times by shenanigan87 on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Going through some of the photos from what turned out to be my last "classic" Schwebebahn tour back in 2018. I was in the middle of writing my PhD thesis, but when friends from the US came to visit just to see the Schwebebahn, I took the day off and went on a photo tour with them. This photo of course shows the famous Kaiserwagen from 1900, about to depart from the terminus Oberbarmen, though we also caught it at another location later on that day.

The title is a reference to the fact that the Schwebebahn hasn't been working properly for a very long time now. After a conductor rail detached from the trackage later that year, service was suspended, and when it did finally resume many months later, all of the old 1970s trains had been retired, with the fleet switched to the all new trains that had been delivered during the outage.

Sadly, these new trains have all sorts of teething troubles. The most serious issue happened shortly after introduction, when one of the trains hit the track structure with its running gear, which should be impossible. Once that issue was rectified, it became apparent that there were serious flaws with the wheelsets and bogies. The wheels wore out much quicker than expected, causing excessive noise and damage to the tracks, leading to yet another lengthy suspension of service. Seems like the operators literally wanted to reinvent the wheel, rather than basing their design on the proven and reliable construction of the old trains, which were pretty bulletproof.

The Kaiserwagen itself was also not safe from issues, as the introduction of the new trains also saw a voltage increase from 600V to 750V, which required a reconstruction of the old DC motors. During the course of this, cracks were discovered in the ancient spoked wheels you can see here, thus requiring costly and time consuming custom made wheels for the train to return to service sometime in the future.