What is stunning about the video is the 120 year old motion picture in a city still without cars, side by side showing the same route with modern traffic (the modern version was edited to match speed).
Here an article about it from The Guardian:
“It looks like something imagined by Jules Verne”
True. And somehow this sentence makes me cry. What if we used technology only to make peoples lives happier and better?
And here wiki with many technical details:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn
It’s unique as it was a special solution to build an urban railway in a narrow valley.
In all the time, it had a single serious accident, in 1999. So comparatively, it is a very safe means of transport.
I have never used it but I remember be riding in an electric trolley bus as a child in Duisburg with my mother …
Small title correction: it’s 1902 and 2015, not 2025.
Thanks!
If we mention the new version was edited to match speeds by that channel, then we should probably also mention the old version was, of course, originally in black and white and needed to be upscaled for this 1 to 1 comparison by the channel Denis Shiryaev. The original 1902 film was taken from the museum of modern art (moma watermark)'s channel.
Still, amazing how we’re able to have a pretty good guess what a place looked like to people 100 years ago, before our hubris and malice led us to the most destructive wars ever seen.
A friend of mine was very enthusiastic about this as well, he actually planned an entire trip around visiting the Schwebebahn. From his account it’s truly as wicked as it looks, and very stable as well.
I went to Wuppertal for the Schwebebahn as well; it’s really cool and unique, and when making a turn you really get a floating sensation.
Something surprising to me were the ticket stamping machines on the stations. These are the exact machines we used to have in metro stations and trams in Rotterdam to stamp our strippenkaarten, but we’ve had a digital, ‘tapping’ system since the 2000’s. It was a huge blast from the past for me. They even made the exact ringing sound when pushing in the ticket I remember from my childhood.
I think it’s the music that’s giving nostalgic feelings about this…but it is true that in the 1900 decade there was a lot of promise and no time to misuse it yet.
Besides all tech progress was visible as something concrete, unlike since the 70s due to miniaturization of microchips and the transfer to software.
So the “original” video was not just colorized, but interpolated - the frame rate is wrong?
https://youtu.be/2Ud1aZFE0fU - this is the unedited version.
