An Elephant named Tuffi

We had one last stop before reaching our final stay in Amsterdam.
Originally we had randomly picked a small but nice sounding town named Limburg an der Lahn. It looked like it had some nice scenery & a beautiful cathedral.

Then I remembered a spectacular train I had read about….
The oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars in the world - the Wuppertal Schwebebahn - and it would dovetail in with our return beautifully 😎

So…one hotel cancelled and another booked.
As we arrived into the city, we could see the spiders legs of the suspension engineering. Like something out of an early science fiction film!

The train design was originally offered to Berlin, Munich and Breslau (now Wrocław) who all turned it down.
Built between 1897 and 1903, with Kaiser Wilhelm having a ride in the first section before it opened in 1901, the train mostly travels 12m above the River Wupper after which the town is named.
It is an astonishing feat of engineering, and still carries around 80,000 people every single day. The entire line takes under 30 minutes to travel, including the 20 station stops.

Buying the ticket was an infuriating challenge… stabbing the UK flag on the machine only changed a few of the words: you need the 24-StundenTicket to be able to travel for 24 hours: about €11 for two 👍

There have been a couple of notable incidents on the train.

On 21st July 1950, a circus were doing a publicity stunt with a baby elephant. The creature got spooked by the swaying and broke through the carriage to crash 12m into the river below 😱
Fortunately the elephant, two journalists, and one passenger sustained only minor injuries. I have no idea how the poor thing survived: the river today does not look deep.
After that jump, the elephant got the name Tuffi, meaning 'waterdive' in Italian…and lived for another 40 years 👍

The line suffered it’s first and only fatal incident on 12th April 1999. Some engineering workers left a temporary metal claw on the track, which caused the train to derail, falling 10m to the river below, killing 5 and injuring many others 😔

The trains were replaced in 2019, although frankly we felt the blue colour rather clashed with the old green supports: orange would have worked better!
We spent a happy couple of hours riding the beauty, hopping off a few times, snapping away….an older German lady pointed out that there is a Tuffi sculpture between two stations in the river, so we had to head back to catch that. Another older gentleman enthusiastically told us something in German: when we shook our heads and explained we were English, he resolutely continued to point and speak German. No idea what he was talking about 🤣
At the end of the line; the trains do a very tight U-turn to head back. Fascinating to watch!

I think even Christine secretly turned into a little bit of a train buff on this 😉

After all that excitement, the town itself is extraordinarily uninspiring. When we checked in, the young man almost seemed a bit surprised we were there for pleasure and not business….but did reach for his drawer to share a foldaway map of the line for us.

Primark does have a quite spectacular building just outside the main station, and Bauer have some huge factory buildings along the eastern side of the line…..but otherwise, the main centre was bereft of much more than a couple of quirky statues…the one of the man, Zuckerfritz, resting by his barrow after a hard days work is a nice reminder that not all monuments need to be of famous personalities!

Dinner was a too large but healthy looking poke bowl served up by a bored looking young man at MALOA. His shirt told us “don’t worry, you can add avocado later”, which was laden heavy with irony: as he was making mine, he ask if I would like anything in place of the avocado, which had run out 🤣Read more