This is what crossing the Berlin Wall by the S-Bahn looked like. Also, if you like the sound of the classic ET 165 train engines, here is the relevant nostalgia in stereo :-) Filmed in late November 1989, soon after the fall of the wall, but nothing has changed here yet except the border guard booths are empty. There would normally be there a guy in uniform, usually surgically attached to his binoculars or a telephone. The footage looks a bit dreary but November is a dreary month in that part of Europe! I tried to fix this a bit but one of these decades I need to run it through a proper AI-based colour corrector.
The ride starts in the western half of the station Friedrichstraße located in East Berlin (one would normally be in that half after the passport control, like in an airport secure area). That S-Bahn line was a western one, terminating at that stop, so it had to cross the wall to reach it. The corresponding eastern line served the eastern half of the station building and extended into East Berlin, with its own platform separated from the western one by a metal wall (you can see it at the very end in the background, with some eastern advertising on it). Then we cross to the first station in West Berlin (Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, now replaced by the giant Hauptbahnhof).
See also: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-Baur...
4 май 2022
