Siemensstadt is named for the behemoth of a company that is known as Siemens. Siemens was founded in Berlin during the city's industrial heyday in the 1800s (a while back I wrote here about how important industry used to be for the city). In 1897, the firm opened a big complex of worker housing, administrative offices, equipment plants, and factories in northwest Berlin, and the area came to be known as Siemensstadt (Siemens City). The commuter train line that we were visiting was built in 1927 to ferry Siemens workers who did not live in the area to the big Siemensstadt campus. The tracks largely survived WWII, but the Siemensstadt line met its end in 1980. At that point, an East German rail authority was still running all of Berlin's S-Bahn commuter trains, even the ones on the other side of the wall in West Berlin (such as the Siemensstadt line). West Berliners, not keen on financially supporting the oppressive East German government by purchasing train fares for the S-Bahn, boycotted the S-Bahn system. Between the boycott and a train worker strike, that was that - close to half of the S-Bahn lines in Berlin were shuttered, including the line that served Siemensstadt station. Today, both the S-Bahn trains and Siemens workers remain absent from Siemensstadt. It was the perfect spooky setting for us to do some exploring!
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| Our first look at the former station |
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| Sarah and I go way back - we first hung out way back when the program started up in Washington, D.C., then we shared a host family in Cologne, and finally we both moved to Berlin. We also traveled to Belgium and Prague together, and would later also go to Poland and Croatia. If there's anyone I trust to lead me through an old abandoned train station, it's Sarah |
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| There's not that much left, not that there could have been a lot of exciting attractions at a train station to begin with. But it was all super fun to photograph |
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| While processing these photos, it suddenly occurred to me that empty railroad tracks are a favorite subject of hipster photographers. It was time to flex my hipster muscles and do my best Instagram filter imitation |
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| Yes, so much more hipster! |
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| We weren't entirely sure if it was completely kosher to be up there, so we made a (laughable) effort to be stealthy |
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| Of course, as soon as we left, we watched as several Germans just waltzed right up onto the station without even trying to hide their presence, so all our ducking and darting and bending was pointless |
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| Oh right, we're doing hipster style |
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| The thing about "poor but sexy" Berlin is that much of the city is young, broke, artistic, liberal, open-minded, and thoroughly hipster. Maybe it's because she went to college in the universally recognized hipster capital of the United States (Portland), but Sarah meshed into the scene extraordinarily well |
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| ...thus she deserves to be hipster-ified |
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| Faux Instagram filters don't really suit me, though |
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| No train is getting through here any more |
That's it for Siemensstadt, but it wouldn't be the last of our exciting urbex exploits. The post about our next excursion will have to wait though - it's time for my pictures from the Venice of the North: Amsterdam!