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Tony Patterson: German efficiency goes off the rails

Berlin Notebook

Thursday 06 August 2009 00:00 BST
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This city is normally good at organising big sporting events. The 2004 World Cup and – dare I mention it – the 1936 Olympics were classic examples of Teutonic efficiency. But, in the case of the World Championships in athletics, which is due to be staged in Germany's reunited capital in just over a week's time, Berliners have got themselves into a highly embarrassing fix.

The problem is the city's S-Bahn, or overground metropolitan train network. It is threatening to turn the average visitor's experience of the event into a miserable saga of endless waiting for trains that fail to appear.

Back in the 1920s, the S-Bahn was considered the most sophisticated city rail service in the world and vastly superior to London's Metropolitan line. Even when the Berlin Wall was built, the S-Bahn kept running. For the past two months, however, the S-Bahn network has been paralysed by breakdown after breakdown.

More than 300 of the service's 550 trains have been withdrawn because of the operator's failure to carry out routine checks for wheel damage. The ensuing delays have driven commuters apoplectic with rage, and in an attempt at political damage limitation, the mayor of Berlin has threatened to fire the entire operating company.

As I write this, teams of sweating railway maintenance crews are operating round-the-clock shifts in a last-minute attempt to get all the trains running on time for the big athletics show. For weeks Berlin's local media has been feasting on the S-Bahn tale, which has proven to be the ideal silly-season story. "The S-Bahn is still a long way from being able to run what could be described as a normal service," groaned the city's leading daily yesterday. It looks bad for the athletes.

A virtual Wall

Meanwhile, Berlin is gearing up for this November's 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As there is hardly any of the original Wall left standing, the city authorities have been wracking their brains to try and come up with a way of explaining the phenomenon that so cruelly divided the city for 28 years of the Cold War.

The answer appears to be a video bus which takes tourists on a tour of former Wall sites, and fills in the blanks with computerised animations of the structure. Virtual communist dictatorship – viewed from the comfort of your own bus seat. The organisers guarantee that there is no risk of being shot for trying to escape to the West.

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