Stealing the Freiburg seal …… and catching the wrong colour tram

I have never hidden my obsession for collecting street furniture, be it a lamppost a coal hole cover, or an old manual petrol pump.

Some still perform the task they were intended for but most sit forgotten, and neglected and even vandalized and as such are a rusting monument to former technologies.

But in Freiburg the authorities maintain their cast iron sanitation grids even embellishing them with the town’s seal.

When I first came across one of these cast iron grids, I assumed the ornate markings depicted a nearby castle or the city’s walls while the trumpeters were celebrating a martial victory.

But not so.  My Wikipedia tells me that the design has been lifted from the City’s seal and is a “stylised depiction of the façade of the Wasserschlössle, a castle-like waterworks facility built into a hill that overlooks the residential district of Wiehre. 

The seal depicts a three-towered red castle on a white background, with green-clad trumpeters atop the two outer towers”.

It can be found “in a few places in the inner city” and of course on those street covers which make perfect sense given that they all carry the inscription which translates as “Freiburg sewer system”.

It is the sort of discovery which makes me smug and emboldened by the information and looked to launching detailed account of the tram system based on a fine pictures whizzed over by my travelling companion.

But to use that old Hebrew observation “Man makes plans. God laughs”.

And so having added the picture of tramcar 257 in its white and smudgy blue livery I discovered that one source offer up that the trams “operate in an attractive dark red and white livery and run on 5 routes”.

A mystery further compounded by my travelling companion who informed me that “It seems they have multi colours, even a yellow one. And also different makes/designs. I’ll try and find a red one”.

So, I await more trams and will leave you with the information that the “network currently has five lines. 

The expansion of the tram network since 1980 has served as an example of the "renaissance of the trams" in Germany. 

As of 2023, 73 trams were available for regular use: 2 of these were high-floored, 36 partial and 35 low-floored”.**

And just as I finished the piece my travelling companion found a red tram. and followed it up with an old red tram.

All of which leaves me to fall back on that old observation ......"you wait ten minutes for a tram and three Freiburg trams turn up at once".

Location; Freiburg

Pictures; around Freiburg, 2024

* Freiburg im Breisgau,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiburg_im_Breisgau

** Trams in Freiburg im Breisgau, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Freiburg_im_Breisgau

So good it had to be done twice ……..

And why not?

The network may only run for 15 miles along two lines with 22 trams but then the city according to one source is “of a manageable size and much is within walking distance……[so with] public transport  available for longer distances” the tram is the thing.*

 

And with an eye to the positive the network promises “Our strength: short distances” which is nicely delivered by tramcar no. 13.

It was spotted by my travelling chum who yesterday offered up a picture of one of the modern fleet and not content with that was out before breakfast to snap its older companion.

At which point Eric custodian of all things trams will provide a detailed description of tramcar no. 13 but for now I will leave you with the revelation that “Every Saturday until the end of 2022, buses and trams in the city area of Ulm/Neu-Ulm can be used free of charge”.*

Now there will be those who spot that the offer ran out in 2 years ago and so I am wondering if the scheme has made it in 2024, or has some one not updated the promise?

I could phone the company and ask but I am the first to acknowledge that my German isn’t up to the task.

Leaving me to wonder if my travelling chum will pursue the offer and if so will he choose car 13 or 65?

The possibilities are too exciting to contemplate.

Location; Ulm

Picture; the Ulm tram, 2024

* Public Transport in Ulm/Neu-Ulm, https://gruppen.ulm.de/en/planning/travel-planning/public-transport/

Tramming it in Ulm

Now it’s slim pickings when you come to look for information on the tram network in the German city of Ulm.

But then it only operates two lines with one site boasting “Our strength: short distances”.*

That said it still has 22 trams and operates over 15 miles, with one of its destinations the Science Park.

Of course, when my travelling chum sent over his picture I was a tad sceptical that he was in Ulm given the sign on the front of tramcar no.65  says it is going to the Science Park, but even I know the German for Science Park is …… Wissenschaftspark.

Not that I am surprised.

We watch a lot of Italian TV and in the last few years English has invaded chat show conversations, news bulletins and adverts.

Still I shouldn't be harsh, they have been running their trams since 1897, and in "2018, a second main line was added to the former single tram line that had been left of the former network since 1964".**

Perhaps my friend will have better luck in Frieburg which is the next stop.

We shall see.

Location; Ulm

Picture; the Ulm tram bound for the Wissenschaftspark, 2024

*Public Transport in Ulm/Neu-Ulm, https://gruppen.ulm.de/en/planning/travel-planning/public-transport/

**Trams in Ulm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Ulm

A little bit of Manchester …………. in Saxony ……. the city of Chemnitz

There will be those who question a story about a German city with the tenuous link that it was once known as Saxonian Manchester.

But Chemnitz, is also twinned with the city and has been since 1983.

For this and the story of Saxonian Manchester I have my friend Lyn to thank who back in the 1980s worked at Central Library and translated some of the documents relating to the forthcoming twinning agreement.

Back then Chemnitz, was known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, which was its name from 1953 till 1990.

Lyn remembers, “I met a woman from there at the twinning ceremony in Manchester Town Hall and we have stayed in touch over the years.  I went to Karl Marx Stadt in 1988 and stayed the night with her family and visited the city”.

And yesterday following up on that story she sent over the link to a newspaper story published in Germany about the city which  recently named “European capital of culture for 2025 meaning it beat off competition from Hanover, Nuremberg, Hildesheim and Magdeburg. Here are some fascinating facts about the city. 

The golden days for the city of Chemnitz came in the 19th century when it was one of the first German cities to embrace the revolutionary technology of steam power.

It won the moniker 'Saxonian Manchester'. This nickname wasn’t just a reference to the manifold factory chimneys, it was also a comment on the poor air quality in its streets. Just like in the English town, textiles were a central pillar of the local economy.

The city was a hub of invention - six times more patents were registered than the German average. And as industry took off, so too did the population. Chemnitz achieved the status of a Großstadt in 1883 when its population topped 100,000”.*

Großstadt roughly translates as big city, and today it is the third largest city in the German federal state of Saxony after Leipzig and Dresden. It is the 28th largest city of Germany.

So there you have it, I could quote more from the article, but where would the fun be in doing that when you can read the full account along with some fine pictures by following the link.

Location; Germany

Pictures; Chemnitz, 2013, Kora27, Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

*5 things you should know about Chemnitz, the newly crowned capital of culture, The Local, October 29th, 2020, https://www.thelocal.de/20201029/5-things-you-should-know-about-chemnitz-the-newly-crowned-capital-of-culture?fbclid=IwAR17WxLB3cI_izDo3LDnBaq9FmMymtW95DiuMuLZcFwbWDZP7_qERFAw8CQ

That special excursion from Alex ..... taking in a big square, a very tall building and ending with a museum

This is a tram story, although along the way it reveals a bit of detective work, includes one of those preservation societies and ends in a museum which was once the HQ of the secret police.

And it started with a series of tram pictures posted by my friend Kathy when she was in Berlin.

Now I can’t resist a picture of a tram and so when she posted a collection on to social media I was hooked.

This is tram 5984 on route 63.

Intrigued I looked over my pocket guide to Berlin tram routes, but nowhere is there a route 63, although there was once a 60 and a 66 which trundled  respectively along  Schöneberg, Lindenhof – Charlottenburg, Königin-Elisabeth-Straße and Schöneberg, Wartburgplatz – Steglitz, Thorwaldsenstraße.

But number 60 was withdrawn in 1962 and 68 the following year.

Undeterred I went looking for Sonderfahrt which appears on the destination board at the front of the tram only to discover it is not a place but German for special excursion.

This in turn led me to Historic Preservation Association Nahverkerhr Berlin e.V which in association with the Berlin Transport Company was running a special trip on May 20 from the Alexanderplatz, to Hohenschönhausen, which is now a museum but was once the headquarters of the East German Communist Ministry of State Security, the Stasi.

The Society and the transport company run regular trips once a month between April and November using historic trams.

This Sunday  “depending on the weather and technical conditions, the Reko train and the T24 with 2 sidecar are to be used”.  Now I have no idea whether Kathy’s tram was the Reko or T24, but someone will which which save me a search.

The trip apparently cost 6 € for adults and 3 € for children between 6 and 14 and on that sunny day in Berlin there was a choice of the 11 am trip or another at 2pm.

The Berlin tram network is one of the oldest, having been established in 1865 and is the third largest tram system in the world beaten only by Melbourne and St Petersburg.

Just leaving me to say, that Alexanderplatz is a major transport hub, is often referred to as Alex by Berliners* and one of the buildings close by is  the iconic Fernsehturm or TV Tower which is the second tallest building in the European Union.

Location; Berlin

Pictures; tram 63, in Berlin, May 20, 2018, from the collection of Kathy Lee

*Actually being pedantic, and not wanting to be told off, when Berliners refer to Alexanderplatz, as Alex, they generally are referring to a larger neighbourhood stretching from Mollstraße in the northeast to Spandauer Straße and the Rotes Rathaus in the southwest or so Wikipedia tells me

Bowling along on the Berlin Tram

Now I will apologise at the outset for the title and move on, to the interesting stuff.

The Berlin network is one of the oldest, having been established in 1865 and is the third largest tram system in the world beaten only by Melbourne and St Petersburg.

It runs 22 lines covering 430 kilometres and boasts 800 stops.

All of which made it a perfect subject for Peter to paint.

Now there are plenty more fascinating facts but I shall leave them for another day.

That said there will be plenty out there who will have lots to say including Peter who has done the Berlin tram routes and is therefore a better authority than me.

Location; Berlin

Painting; the Berlin tram © Peter Topping, 2008

Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Facebook: Paintings from Pictures https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Be careful of the past you wish for .......

Now, I do feel a bit old when posters I knew have become museum pieces.

I don’t have a date for this one but it was typical of a period of political propaganda dating from the 1930s through to the 1980s.

As a student I had similar ones which decorated the walls of flats I and friends lived in, which I picked up cheaply from left wing book shops.

Back then I believed the propaganda, or if I am honest, wanted to believe it, but it is a view of the world which even then distorted the reality and has all but gone.

This one comes from the museum situated in the old Stasi headquarters in Berlin.

The poster’s slogan runs, “Von den Sowjetmenschen lernen heibt siegen lernen!” which translates as “Learning from the Soviet people means learning to win!”

Peter went round the place yesterday and this is one of the posters he sent back, commenting that “the back story to the poster is that son James’s apartment is in the district where the Stasi headquarters were. His flat is in In the building in front of the Stasi communications building.  All these buildings are still standing. It’s like living in a museum!”

And that last comment got me thinking about what I still had from that period of Soviet propaganda.

The cheap Marxist/Leninist tracts printed in Moscow and Peking vanished a long time ago, as did a fascinating little book of Soviet short stories, but I did come across a book of poetry, and a collection of stories by Soviet Science Fiction writers.

Fifty Soviet Poets, included some like Yevgeni Yevtushenko who were well known in the West, and many who weren’t, and ranged over a variety of different themes, but given that this is a Russian book there is more than a few that are patriotic.

Yevtushenko’s poem, Do the Russians want a War? opens with the lines, “Say do the Russians want a war?- Go ask our land, then ask no more That silence lingering in the air Above the birch and poplar there Beneath those trees lie soldier lads Whose sons will answer for their Dads.  To add to what you have learned before, Say- Do the Russians want a war?”

From the stand point of 1969 when the collection was published, just twenty four years after the end of the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, when the USSR lost 20 million dead, and every community had its own war memorial, it was easy to see the honesty in that poem.

But now, with the Russian Federation flexing its muscles in many different ways, it seems an anachronism, and echoes the comments about Yevtushenko whose poetry is described as “imbued with a sense of civic responsibility” who was “an ardent champion of revolutionary ideas and principles”. *

And looking again at the small collection of Soviet Science Fiction which was published in the early 1970s, is to be reminded that unlike some Western Science Fiction, these stories are all optimistic, focusing on how human beings working together and applying science will create a better world.

Of course we know that that vision of progress as applied across the old Communist bloc was flawed.  It was shot through with technological short cuts which were environmentally disastrous and was achieved at great human cost.

That said, our own Industrial Revolution, driven by the newly emerging capitalistic mode of production which was based on the exploitation of the workforce, assisted by the Slave Trade and conducted a time when only a handful of men had the vote.

At which point someone will mutter ....... and the point is?

To which I can say, there is no point, no lasting message other than that history is messy and sometimes what you thought would be a better way to order the world doesn't quite hack it.

Although the idea of a planet where people are treated equally, are respected and have the material means to live a life of their choice, free from war, tyranny, disease and hunger seems a good one to me.

Location; Stasi Museum, Berlin,

Pictures; from Stasi Museum, Berlin courtesy  of Peter Topping

* Fifty Soviet Poets, 1969, Progress Press, Moscow, page 176