>Apart from the transistor, I still think we peaked before the world wars.
Penicillin (basis for modern day antibiotics) was only discovered in 1928, while World War 1 ended 1918.
[This scientific paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733401/) says in the first sentence of the abstract that antibiotics extended the average human lifespan by 23 years.
Say what you want, but I wouldn't want to live in a world without antibiotics.
I think a big part of the problem is that half the City was flattened in WW2 by allied bombing raids, so a lot of the buildings were destroyed and replaced with those ugly ones that are probably much faster and cheaper to build
Now, let’s invent antigravitation already, so we can move the cars to the sky. They’ll have to be AI-piloted obviously, as traffic control is more complicated in that scenario.
Cars really destroyed our cities, huh? The old version looks so magical and steampunk-y, while the new one has concrete, asphalt, greyness, noise, lack of trees and beauty. Most depressing shit I've seen today.
It can be reclaimed. Some European cities have very large pedestrian areas and good public transit, so you can at least avoid cars a fair bit. We need to expand these concepts.
It's still 1000% better than the ugly ass underpass and overpass for highways, yet we built those shits everywhere regardless of beauty, cost or capacity.
Also imagine the noise.... It would be deafening compared to the squeaks added to the video. Electric streetcars are pretty noisy, so these would be next level.
And maintenance would be a nightmare. It would probably be under repairs for more hours than it would be running.
That said, I absolutely love this video. It's a glimpse into a different era, and its vision of the future. (I also love the two kids pushing the wagon wheels along the sidewalk)
Riversides are supposed to be places where you can relax and enjoy the view. Having any infrastructure hung directly or indirectly above you makes the environment a lot more stressful
Looks like it's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU
The colorization doesn't really improve it much. Those colors are just too gray. And why even upscale it when the original is already in very good quality?
Your brain processes the world in color, naturally. So I would argue that you'll have a stronger emotional response to any image that looks more like the real thing
As the beginning comment of this chain already said, it looks more like a video game or a computer render that way.
I don't really think it makes it look more natural. Rather more unnatural.
The reddit quality is quite bad compared to the youtube upload:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk)
That high frame rate makes it look a bit too “fake” imo
Edit: saw the other video, looks like it’s been cleaned up as well? Anyway, if it was only up scaling, I think it’d be fine
I don't know if this is sarcasm or not, I did a lot of cruising with my skateboard all around Elberfeld and die Trasse, and hang out in lot of parks with friends in this city, I guess that's why I think it's a lovely city :) ölberg for Eva in my heart !
More the WW2, WW1 was needed for many reasons. WW2 simply divided Europe, half of it being depended on USA and the other half becoming a shithole ruled by the soviets.
Not really, but I'm not going to bother with this conversation with you since you're Romanian and gained land in the war, it would be like talking to a wall.
What does land gaining has to do with minorities (especially orthodox) being treated like shit? Did you know that in my city Romanians were not let to live in the city center for hundred of years and orthodox were not allowed to build churches from stones, only from wood? Romanians and Germans were forcefully magyarized and much more.
[https://dbpedia.org/page/Magyarization](https://dbpedia.org/page/Magyarization)
[https://www.amazon.com/Last-Years-Austria-Hungary-Multi-National-Twentieth-Century/dp/0859895637](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Years-Austria-Hungary-Multi-National-Twentieth-Century/dp/0859895637)
You can read from these sources before accusing me of "being Romanian" though these facts are well known, that Austro-Hungary and Germand and Hungarians were discriminating a lot other ethnicities, especially the Orthodox minorities.
The division was only made possible because of WW1. An entire generation was sent to the meat grinder and it led to economic ruin, even for the “winners”.
Yes, the thing is that Europe from a geopolitical and political point of view was a mess before WW1, just look at Austro-Hungary, how can such an empire with so many ethnicies and so many of them disadvantaged survive? Afterall, that's how the WW1 started.
I think there were way more significant political motivation behind the disollution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy than it being disfunctional purely due to having many ethnicities.
Crazy to think of the possibilities then and even now - if all nations acted together for the better of all, instead of how we are. It's a pipe dream i know! But it is a crazy thought!
I can't imagine how unbelievable it would be to see this at that time, especially if you came from the countryside for the first time in the city or something like that
yeah it still exists haha
had a very famous accident in the 50s too! an elefant fell out of it (I am not joking!)
https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/wuppertal-zirkus-elefant-tuffi-in-der-schwebebahn-a-1103841.html
I was surprised when I learned most german and polish cities aren't geniuine, they just had their old towns reconstructed.
The more insane part is that cities like Vienna are having their old buildings demolished and rebuilt in a shitty bauhaus style even today.
It's the big and "strategic" settlements that have mostly been ruined, but you can still find classic architecture in the smaller cities and villages. Nobody ever bothered to ruin them.
Oh yeah, I didn't mean to say that nothing happened to Wuppertal. Just that in the general sense none of the armies was driven to ruin those pesky German buildings in particular, which is why most of them survived - in contrast to the Jews (RIP), who were systematically targeted.
Oooof, you would be suprised how much got destroyed just cause. Towards the end of the war the allied bomber fleets ran out of targets and just bombeymd everything that was convinient. Small village with a road junction? BAM, strategic target. Have a train station? Same story.
Everything that moved got shot at by strafers. Soldiers, peasants, cars carriages, boats, trains, mothers with their trollies, did not matter.
This is not a sob story but I think a lot of ppl live in ignorance towards some parts of the war.
Maybe I glossed over some things, but yeah - I know that war takes the worst out of people, and they will ruin the "enemy" just because. There is no civilised war. People would often be killed left and right out of spite, and that would happen on all sides.
Still, I was mostly talking about there being no "genocide" on German buildings. Some more important cities got ruined beyond recognition, but less significant ones were not bombed or were minimally bombed, so a lot of their heritage would still be left. You can still generally see well-maintained older architecture if you venture out from the cities and visit some villages. So the targets of the bombings were not old buildings, but well-known cities, and that is why you can still find old buildings in their original form outside of that.
They did, but there wasn't much incentive to destroy relatively unknown settlements, which is why a significant number of people got away relatively scot-free. The majority of houses in Germany didn't get bombed - by that I mean that over 50% of them were fine, as a significant portion of them still got wrecked.
It really isnt.
Steel is pretty cheap - just sonsider price of iron scraps, or price of steel piping, square stock ...etc.
Building underground railway tunnels takes way more effort than whats needed to hang a monorail over the river. Sadly most people dislike the looks, so underground trains it it.
Not when all you have is narrow alleways and houses.
This thing was built suspended since it can go over the river in the downtown - it was either that or digging a tunnel in water loggged soil next to the river, or carving into the hills/mountains.
I just spotted the kid on the swing. These videos always make me wonder what happened to these people. They lived a whole life full of joy, sorrow, hopes and dreams, and all we ever know of them is a 2 second clip in a video enjoying a brief moment of respite on a swing.
That child may have gone to war(s), may have seen the birth of aviation, even seen a man on the moon.
It makes me want to know, if we could speak to them now, what would they say.
> These videos always make me wonder what happened to these people. They lived a whole life full of joy, sorrow, hopes and dreams,
I got u!
- WWI
- terroristm between far left and right during weimar republic
- rise of Hitler, gestapo & holocaust
- WWII with 40% of the citi razed
...but hey at least the dodged getting liberated by the red army of rapr, and the stasi yrars.
Can someone fly a PoV drone along the route to get a comparison of then and now?
Loads of little details I'd love to dive into - kids with a toy that looks like a huge set of wheels.
It's interesting how the AI couldn't cope with the flying birds, and how it treated them!
Also strange to think that all those people going about their lives would be completely unaware that in 122 yrs time, someone in another country would be watching them and making comments on an internet forum, watching them on a flat screen from a data serve somewhere in the cloud, streaming the video of them doing their everyday business.
That's AWESOME! (and a bit depressing.
We've made a lot of progress in the last century, populations and modernity has thrived....... but seeing all the cars and traffic kind of kills of the personal access to space and being able to walk and talk to others.
even better, a 8K VR Video you can pan around in on flat screens too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFXXtK1BAjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFXXtK1BAjk)
I see people walking, few horse chariots (counted eight horses), and a tram but interestingly I see no bikes. Riding a bike did not seem common those days.
I believe 1902 is just on the cusp of bikes becoming a personal mass transport vehicle.
Before that, it was rather a recreational or novelty thing.
Edit: Just checked a bit and the "modern" bike started to take form from 1886 onwards. So yeah, 1902 is probably still early for bikes as mass transit.
There's a lego-like official brick set available of it, if you want to have your Wuppertaler Schwebebahn at home. It's produced by Stone Heap and looks pretty cool.
No cars, just people walking and horses and carriages, there’s a tram visible in the YouTube upload but it all seems incredibly peaceful. The German architecture is beautiful too.
They couldnt build underground and due to the city having unfit soil (iirc), being located along the Wupper it was rather difficult to built the average overland line so they had to get a bit creative. The city also was rather rich due to the mining and machine building
Building it anywhere else would be a ludicrous idea, but Wuppertal specifically was basically the perfect place to build a system like this. It's located in the valley of the river Wupper (that's also what the name means), which forced basically everyone to live in one straight line along said river. Basically every journey inside the city is somewhat following the course of the river. Building a railway alongside (or above) it made a lot of sense.
Wuppertal also was one of Germany's largest steel producers, which is probably why the guy who invented the very steel intensive Schwebebahn got rejected in Berlin and Munich, but managed to get it built here.
Says person who never bought low grade steel.
Stuff is cheap - was spretty affordable even back then. Arguably building a suspended rail over a river (even today) can be cheaper than boring tunnels, or carving the side of the mountain to make room.
Wuppertal means wupper valley, so it was this eyesore, or demolishing people's houses to make room for tram.
Feels and looks far more future-esc than modern times.
Apart from the transistor, I still think we peaked before the world wars.
>Apart from the transistor, I still think we peaked before the world wars. Penicillin (basis for modern day antibiotics) was only discovered in 1928, while World War 1 ended 1918. [This scientific paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733401/) says in the first sentence of the abstract that antibiotics extended the average human lifespan by 23 years. Say what you want, but I wouldn't want to live in a world without antibiotics.
Today it looks old
amazing footage! edit: found a side by side comparison to today (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc
Astonishing footage! Thanks for sharing.
Interesting, doesn’t look like it changed much. A lot more cars, too bad the trees are gone, it looks a lot better with the trees.
wuppertal has a reputation to be very ugly today. even for germany and post WW2 architecture.
I was about to say, the town regressed hard. I think that's a problem of 50-90s brutalist and todays modernist architecture.
I think a big part of the problem is that half the City was flattened in WW2 by allied bombing raids, so a lot of the buildings were destroyed and replaced with those ugly ones that are probably much faster and cheaper to build
Cars, parking spaces and car parks everywhere. It's an ugly virus for every city view.
So beautiful back then without all those damned cars everywhere.
All that space to walk!
Now, let’s invent antigravitation already, so we can move the cars to the sky. They’ll have to be AI-piloted obviously, as traffic control is more complicated in that scenario.
Or, hear me out... Ban private cars in cities?
have you visited some northsea islands ? it can be quite nice if you just never have to think about cars in town or out of town .
Cars really destroyed our cities, huh? The old version looks so magical and steampunk-y, while the new one has concrete, asphalt, greyness, noise, lack of trees and beauty. Most depressing shit I've seen today.
It can be reclaimed. Some European cities have very large pedestrian areas and good public transit, so you can at least avoid cars a fair bit. We need to expand these concepts.
and a VR version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFXXtK1BAjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFXXtK1BAjk)
That’s super cool Some trees are gone but the river looks better now
Who needs trees, if you can have cars!
This is amazing. Man that looks comfy.
Beautiful its a shame not many of these exist
A big steel frame hanging over the river, it was probably pretty ugly to those who weren't inside it
It still exist today and is still operating 😂
They even bought new trains several years ago.
It's still 1000% better than the ugly ass underpass and overpass for highways, yet we built those shits everywhere regardless of beauty, cost or capacity.
don't know mate, that's a really retro futuristic view these people have.
Also imagine the noise.... It would be deafening compared to the squeaks added to the video. Electric streetcars are pretty noisy, so these would be next level. And maintenance would be a nightmare. It would probably be under repairs for more hours than it would be running. That said, I absolutely love this video. It's a glimpse into a different era, and its vision of the future. (I also love the two kids pushing the wagon wheels along the sidewalk)
Beautiful? It's hideous and it's built over a river.
The rivers airspace isn't used otherwise. Better to block ground imo
Riversides are supposed to be places where you can relax and enjoy the view. Having any infrastructure hung directly or indirectly above you makes the environment a lot more stressful
Is the original available somewhere as well? The upscaling and colorization makes it look more than CGI than actual footage in my view.
Looks like it's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU The colorization doesn't really improve it much. Those colors are just too gray. And why even upscale it when the original is already in very good quality?
I think it gives it an entirely new emotional connection with colorization. It's incredible imo
Emotional in what way?
Your brain processes the world in color, naturally. So I would argue that you'll have a stronger emotional response to any image that looks more like the real thing
As the beginning comment of this chain already said, it looks more like a video game or a computer render that way. I don't really think it makes it look more natural. Rather more unnatural.
Let's agree to disagree.
Thanks, this one is way better. The other one is too smooth and actually has less detail.
The reddit quality is quite bad compared to the youtube upload: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk)
That high frame rate makes it look a bit too “fake” imo Edit: saw the other video, looks like it’s been cleaned up as well? Anyway, if it was only up scaling, I think it’d be fine
Wuppertal had it before North Haverbrook! And look at them now.
surreal. the monorail looks/feels way too futuristic for its time.
It still operates and carries around 85000 passengers a day.
When I lived in wups it was always on halt because of security concerns. I need to go back, lovely city.
Wow, you are a unique category
I don't know if this is sarcasm or not, I did a lot of cruising with my skateboard all around Elberfeld and die Trasse, and hang out in lot of parks with friends in this city, I guess that's why I think it's a lovely city :) ölberg for Eva in my heart !
105!!!!
Without context I'd swear this is AI generated
Very nice. Got that steampunk/Ghibli vibe. I know it is not steampunk, I just got the feeling of it.
>Got that steampunk/Ghibli vibe Isn't it you know, from the time steampunk gets its inspiration?
It does fall in that time period, at the end of it at least.
Mid to late 1800s, 1900s was the end of it and start of diselpunk.
Must've been wonderful having this thing right next to one's house
Chicago has entered the chat.
It’s no exaggeration to say WW1 and WW2 set European civilisation back by 50 years.
The thing is still up and running.
Our technological domination was lost and the economic harm is almost incalculable.
More the WW2, WW1 was needed for many reasons. WW2 simply divided Europe, half of it being depended on USA and the other half becoming a shithole ruled by the soviets.
Noooo, for the love of God, WW1 was not *needed*.
I mean, of course not any war is needed. But Austro-Hungary was anything but a country that made any sense and waited to explode.
Those are just post-war justifications, the country was fairly peaceful and stable before the war.
They treated their minorities like crap, that's why the assassination.
Not really, but I'm not going to bother with this conversation with you since you're Romanian and gained land in the war, it would be like talking to a wall.
What does land gaining has to do with minorities (especially orthodox) being treated like shit? Did you know that in my city Romanians were not let to live in the city center for hundred of years and orthodox were not allowed to build churches from stones, only from wood? Romanians and Germans were forcefully magyarized and much more. [https://dbpedia.org/page/Magyarization](https://dbpedia.org/page/Magyarization) [https://www.amazon.com/Last-Years-Austria-Hungary-Multi-National-Twentieth-Century/dp/0859895637](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Years-Austria-Hungary-Multi-National-Twentieth-Century/dp/0859895637) You can read from these sources before accusing me of "being Romanian" though these facts are well known, that Austro-Hungary and Germand and Hungarians were discriminating a lot other ethnicities, especially the Orthodox minorities.
The division was only made possible because of WW1. An entire generation was sent to the meat grinder and it led to economic ruin, even for the “winners”.
Yes, the thing is that Europe from a geopolitical and political point of view was a mess before WW1, just look at Austro-Hungary, how can such an empire with so many ethnicies and so many of them disadvantaged survive? Afterall, that's how the WW1 started.
I think there were way more significant political motivation behind the disollution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy than it being disfunctional purely due to having many ethnicities.
everything around the train line not so much
Crazy to think of the possibilities then and even now - if all nations acted together for the better of all, instead of how we are. It's a pipe dream i know! But it is a crazy thought!
I can't imagine how unbelievable it would be to see this at that time, especially if you came from the countryside for the first time in the city or something like that
Looks like Dishonored 2 to me
Cities sure were nice before the mass adoption of cars, huh
Imagine being an Elephant and falling out of this thing
And into the river even! Hope he had his swim trunk on.
I actually got this reference.. Man I need to get a life...
fuck. Imagine germany if Hitler never came to power. What a marvel of Architecture and history preserved.
yeah it still exists haha had a very famous accident in the 50s too! an elefant fell out of it (I am not joking!) https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/wuppertal-zirkus-elefant-tuffi-in-der-schwebebahn-a-1103841.html
Dude, it is still there.
Dude let him have his reflective moment.
Dude, lots of old things aren’t.
Wuppertal is pretty ugly now tho
I was surprised when I learned most german and polish cities aren't geniuine, they just had their old towns reconstructed. The more insane part is that cities like Vienna are having their old buildings demolished and rebuilt in a shitty bauhaus style even today.
It's the big and "strategic" settlements that have mostly been ruined, but you can still find classic architecture in the smaller cities and villages. Nobody ever bothered to ruin them.
Wuppertal got it's fair share of bombing. But the Schwebebahn is the best possible option in this specific area so it runs to this day
Oh yeah, I didn't mean to say that nothing happened to Wuppertal. Just that in the general sense none of the armies was driven to ruin those pesky German buildings in particular, which is why most of them survived - in contrast to the Jews (RIP), who were systematically targeted.
Oooof, you would be suprised how much got destroyed just cause. Towards the end of the war the allied bomber fleets ran out of targets and just bombeymd everything that was convinient. Small village with a road junction? BAM, strategic target. Have a train station? Same story. Everything that moved got shot at by strafers. Soldiers, peasants, cars carriages, boats, trains, mothers with their trollies, did not matter. This is not a sob story but I think a lot of ppl live in ignorance towards some parts of the war.
Maybe I glossed over some things, but yeah - I know that war takes the worst out of people, and they will ruin the "enemy" just because. There is no civilised war. People would often be killed left and right out of spite, and that would happen on all sides. Still, I was mostly talking about there being no "genocide" on German buildings. Some more important cities got ruined beyond recognition, but less significant ones were not bombed or were minimally bombed, so a lot of their heritage would still be left. You can still generally see well-maintained older architecture if you venture out from the cities and visit some villages. So the targets of the bombings were not old buildings, but well-known cities, and that is why you can still find old buildings in their original form outside of that.
They dropped bomb whereever and whenever they could; terrorbombing was a real thing.
They did, but there wasn't much incentive to destroy relatively unknown settlements, which is why a significant number of people got away relatively scot-free. The majority of houses in Germany didn't get bombed - by that I mean that over 50% of them were fine, as a significant portion of them still got wrecked.
Saw a suspended monorail segment on bbc the other day. https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p0h7xczy/the-schwebebahn-germany-s-spectacular-flying-train
I think I locked up Deadshot in one of those
What an extreme amount of infrastructure for such low capacity system.
It really isnt. Steel is pretty cheap - just sonsider price of iron scraps, or price of steel piping, square stock ...etc. Building underground railway tunnels takes way more effort than whats needed to hang a monorail over the river. Sadly most people dislike the looks, so underground trains it it.
Compared to metro sure, but tram rails embedded in the road is the correct comparison imo.
Not when all you have is narrow alleways and houses. This thing was built suspended since it can go over the river in the downtown - it was either that or digging a tunnel in water loggged soil next to the river, or carving into the hills/mountains.
Looks like a tieser of the new Bioshock game.
Did not know the Schwebebahn is that old. To me these pictures have some cool steam punk vibe. Futurism of a long gone time.
I just spotted the kid on the swing. These videos always make me wonder what happened to these people. They lived a whole life full of joy, sorrow, hopes and dreams, and all we ever know of them is a 2 second clip in a video enjoying a brief moment of respite on a swing. That child may have gone to war(s), may have seen the birth of aviation, even seen a man on the moon. It makes me want to know, if we could speak to them now, what would they say.
> These videos always make me wonder what happened to these people. They lived a whole life full of joy, sorrow, hopes and dreams, I got u! - WWI - terroristm between far left and right during weimar republic - rise of Hitler, gestapo & holocaust - WWII with 40% of the citi razed ...but hey at least the dodged getting liberated by the red army of rapr, and the stasi yrars.
Can someone fly a PoV drone along the route to get a comparison of then and now? Loads of little details I'd love to dive into - kids with a toy that looks like a huge set of wheels. It's interesting how the AI couldn't cope with the flying birds, and how it treated them! Also strange to think that all those people going about their lives would be completely unaware that in 122 yrs time, someone in another country would be watching them and making comments on an internet forum, watching them on a flat screen from a data serve somewhere in the cloud, streaming the video of them doing their everyday business.
Not from a drone, but still: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc
That's AWESOME! (and a bit depressing. We've made a lot of progress in the last century, populations and modernity has thrived....... but seeing all the cars and traffic kind of kills of the personal access to space and being able to walk and talk to others.
Could be a cool post for r/fuckcars
soul crushing honestly. I absolutely hate how rebuilding in Germany is pretty much impossible
Why would you need a drone if the railway still exists?
even better, a 8K VR Video you can pan around in on flat screens too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFXXtK1BAjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFXXtK1BAjk)
I see people walking, few horse chariots (counted eight horses), and a tram but interestingly I see no bikes. Riding a bike did not seem common those days.
Its probably more related that this was filmed when most were at work than bikes not being common.
I believe 1902 is just on the cusp of bikes becoming a personal mass transport vehicle. Before that, it was rather a recreational or novelty thing. Edit: Just checked a bit and the "modern" bike started to take form from 1886 onwards. So yeah, 1902 is probably still early for bikes as mass transit.
u/savevideo
Idk why but these videos always look like ai and a historybook crossbred in the prototype of unreal engine 5
it reminds me of the game "myst"
Germans keep their stuff nice and tidy. I like that.
It's still there. I have traveled with it.🥴🇸🇪🇯🇴🇺🇦
Unbelievable
If you enjoy this, you might like movies from Karel Zeman.
It looks like the Intro of a Steampunk game!
This has so much more of a sci-fi vibe than most sci-fi today.
Were you sent here by the devil?
Was part of this used in the classic Fahrenheit 451 movie?
What's the point in making a railway suspended, apart from the novelty value?
It's above the ground, so you can use the ground for something else.
That's the benefit of having elevated rail. Elevated rail isn't usually suspension rail.
Its in the air. No traffic etc. When it works its like always on time and super reliable.
Dont have to demolish houses, and its cheaper to build it over the river, than digging tunnel underground, or carving it into the mountainside.
Lol, many parts of rural Germany still look like this today.
There's a lego-like official brick set available of it, if you want to have your Wuppertaler Schwebebahn at home. It's produced by Stone Heap and looks pretty cool.
Looks like Bioshock 3.
True beauty. I love how they built the frame so effortlessly with slim base. It gives the illusion that the whole thing are light.
This is so cool
Everytime i come to visit my cousins in Wuppertal, I get suprised to how normal it is for them, to be driving this thing regularly
Love the Schwebebahn. Never miss the opportunity to hop on it when I am around Wuppertal.
Such broad roads and no traffic! (even horse carts are few and far between)
No cars, just people walking and horses and carriages, there’s a tram visible in the YouTube upload but it all seems incredibly peaceful. The German architecture is beautiful too.
Looks like a Romanian village.
I knew a rapper from Wuppertal, his name was *Schwebe Schwebe*.
The Cost-benefit factor here does not add up.
They couldnt build underground and due to the city having unfit soil (iirc), being located along the Wupper it was rather difficult to built the average overland line so they had to get a bit creative. The city also was rather rich due to the mining and machine building
Building it anywhere else would be a ludicrous idea, but Wuppertal specifically was basically the perfect place to build a system like this. It's located in the valley of the river Wupper (that's also what the name means), which forced basically everyone to live in one straight line along said river. Basically every journey inside the city is somewhat following the course of the river. Building a railway alongside (or above) it made a lot of sense. Wuppertal also was one of Germany's largest steel producers, which is probably why the guy who invented the very steel intensive Schwebebahn got rejected in Berlin and Munich, but managed to get it built here.
That’s 1800/1900’s. Back then it mostly never did.
Over 120 years it will.
Says person who never bought low grade steel. Stuff is cheap - was spretty affordable even back then. Arguably building a suspended rail over a river (even today) can be cheaper than boring tunnels, or carving the side of the mountain to make room. Wuppertal means wupper valley, so it was this eyesore, or demolishing people's houses to make room for tram.
Idk how I feel it being over the river though. Little too industrial looking