Rhine tower

Düsseldorf is a well connected city. There is the S Bahn, the U Bahn, the trams and the buses. Getting about the city is easy. Then there is the location of the city itself. Nordrhein-Westfalen -- Germany's most populous and densely populated state -- is nearly twice the size of Wales, but has over double the population of London. 18 million people live here, and Düsseldorf is the capital. Trains come and go by the minute, hastily keeping the cities of Cologne, Bonn, Wuppertal, Dortmund, Duisburg, etc, well connected. Then there are trains, several times an hour, to the nearby Netherlands and Belgium. That is a real plus side to Düsseldorf.

But then there is the downside to living in Düsseldorf, or at least a downside to living on BachStraße in Düsseldorf. For here we have to endue the apocalypse trams. You see, Düsseldorf has really new trams, new trams, trams, old trams, and really old trams. And then it has the oldest trams in the known universe. It just so happens that these trams (strange remnants, let over from when the universe was just a fraction-of-a-millionth-of-a-second-old) make their way down BachStraße every ten minutes. And they seem to run all night long, too.

It makes sleeping hard. And I often find myself awaking at some godforsaken hour, thinking the world is about to end, only to realise it is one of the apocalypse trams slowly passing by.

Despite being deafening loud, they are elusive and hard to photograph. I managed to catch one on camera as it was passing, but the quality isn't very good.Read more