Rail City Berlin: Rail Infrastructure Development and Intermodality in the Reunified German Capital

Berlin is known for an expansive transit system featuring a variety of different rail services. But Berlin was divided by a heavily guarded concrete wall for a quarter century, with rail systems operations developing in quite different ways in East and West Berlin. Berlin's rail system was critically evaluated before, during, and after the times of the Berlin wall, with emphasis on the postreunification period. Several valuable lessons can be learned both from Berlin's best practices and from its less shining moments. Berlin is a particularly interesting example of rail transit redevelopment and expansion because of its repeated “zero hour” situations after war-related destruction and after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. After 1990, extraordinary sums were invested to completely restructure Berlin's urban and regional rail networks and to connect the city to the high-speed rail network in West Germany. In the end, postreunification Berlin's triple challenge of simultaneously developing new high-speed connections to other cities, completely overhauling and restructuring its internal rail system, and ensuring that the new system would be properly and intermodally connected to the rest of the transportation network, is not dissimilar to the situation many U.S. cities are facing today. The core issues that warrant critical discussion are the relationships and trade-offs between the various investments into long-distance, regional, and urban rail lines.