Siemensbahn
The Siemens & Halske company privately financed the line to improve worker access to its industrial district in the eponymous Siemensstadt locality of Spandau.
Upon completion in 1929, Siemens handed ownership and control to Deutsche Reichsbahn for integration into the Berliner Stadt-, Ring- und Vorortbahnen ("Stadtbahn, Ringbahn and suburban railways") network.
After decades of low ridership numbers and lack of investment, Siemensbahn fell into disuse in September 1980 when industrial action of East German railway personnel precipitated the abandonment of substantial portions of the West Berlin network.
That station was partly rebuilt with an improved platform arrangement designed to handle high volumes of passengers without delaying Ringbahn services during shift change.
Spanning some of the 1 km distance between Siemensstadt and Gartenfeld stations is a yard with six tail tracks that, in the early years, provided terminal and stabling capacity for up to twelve rush-hour trains, but was repeatedly scaled down in the following decades.
The electro-mechanical interlocking with multi-aspect colour light signals implemented automated and semi-automated modes to enable dense traffic of up to 24 trains per hour and direction (150-second theoretical headway).
The interlocking was produced by Vereinigte Eisenbahn-Signalwerke (VES), a joint venture of Siemens & Halske's own railway equipment company with Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) and Eisenbahnsignal-Bauanstalten Max Jüdel, Stahmer, Bruchsal.
The station opened on the Berlin–Hamburg Railway as Fürstenbrunn (renamed to Siemensstadt-Fürstenbrunn in 1925) and initially saw high passenger numbers despite its less than ideal location beyond the southern edge of Siemensstadt.
The trains were electric; the "Grand Electrisation" (German: "Große Elektrisierung"), the wholesale conversion of the existing Berlin city, ring and suburban railways from steam engines to third rail powered DC traction, was in full swing at the time.
The dismal financial outlook of Deutsche Reichsbahn's operations in West Berlin led to plans of imminent service cuts with worsening conditions for the railway workers.
U-Bahn line U7 had been extended to Siemensstadt in October 1980, was fast and modern and offered direct links to many relevant areas of West Berlin.
After decommissioning, the railway land would have reverted to Siemens' ownership and the alignment no longer been safeguarded, rendering any future reactivation plans moot.
Deutsche Bahn, or the districts of Spandau and Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf in which the railway line runs, carried out some maintenance work at the decaying and overgrown tracks and structures.
In 2014, the architect and lecturer at the Stuttgart Technology University of Applied Sciences, Rebecca Chestnutt-Niess, worked with students to develop designs for potential use.
Inspired by the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord and New York City's successful High Line, the re-urbanization project included ideas for a foot and cycle path, a swimming lane on a section of the Siemensbahn and the partial greening of the viaduct.
The route would run along the old Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal, through a beaver preserve and parallel to Rhenaniastraße to a new Daumstrasse station and then across the river Havel to a new terminus at Streitstrasse, south of the Goltzstrasse intersection in Hakenfelde.
The reconstruction was subsequently included in the "i2030" common transport planning framework of the two federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg and Deutsche Bahn.
[8] In November 2019, DB Netz AG issued a Europe-wide tender for the creation of a feasibility study for a second construction phase, Gartenfeld to Hakenfelde.
The study includes various route options for a two-track extension for a maximum speed of 100 km/h with the intermediate stops "Gartenfeld", "Wasserstadt Oberhavel" and "Hakenfelde".
