[3] However, the towns of Barmen, Elberfeld, and Vohwinkel along the banks of the river Wupper were intrigued by the technology’s ability to connect their communities.

The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn had a forerunner: in 1824, Henry Robinson Palmer of Britain presented a railway system which differed from all previous constructions.

Harkort had his own steel mill in Elberfeld; he built a demonstration segment of the Palmer system and set it up in 1826 on the grounds of what is today the Wuppertal tax office.

[6][7] In 2003, the Rhine Heritage Office (Rheinisches Amt für Denkmalpflege des Landschaftsverbandes Rheinland or LVR) announced the discovery of an original section of the test route of the Schwebebahn.

[citation needed] Construction on the Schwebebahn began in 1898, overseen by the government's master builder, Wilhelm Feldmann.

[9] In 2012, the Schwebebahn was closed for significant periods to allow upgrades to the system: from 7 to 21 July and 6 August to 22 October, and on weekends in September (15/16) and November (10/11).

The 31 new articulated cars were assembled by Vossloh España in Valencia, Spain,[13] featuring a light blue livery and having cushioned seating, air conditioning, information displays, LED lights, improved disabled access, and induction motors with energy recovery during braking.

[14] The first new train was commissioned by WSW in 2015[15][16] and entered regular passenger service on 18 December 2016,[17] at which point the line's power supply voltage was raised from 600 to 750 V.[18] The GTW 72 stock was gradually withdrawn from service as the new trains were introduced, the last of which operated immediately prior to the line's shutdown in November 2018.

WSW announced it would not scrap any of the GTW 72 stock, but instead offer 21 of the vehicles for sale and three for free, as long as they remained in the city of Wuppertal.

Shonan Monorail is a suspension railway located in Kanagawa, Japan and connects the cities between Kamakura and Fujisawa.

When the line was originally built, Anton Rieppel, head of MAN-Werk Gustavsburg, designed the structural system, which he patented.

For Herzl, the Schwebebahn was the ideal form of urban transport, and he imagined a large monorail built in its style in Haifa.

It also appears in the 1992 Dutch movie The Sunday Child (De Zondagsjongen) by Pieter Verhoeff, in Tom Tykwer's 2000 film The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), and as a background to a number of outdoor dance choreographies in another Wim Wenders film – 2011's Pina, where some dances are also set inside the cars.

[32] Some of the events in Le Feu de Wotan, a Belgian bande dessinée in the Yoko Tsuno series, take place in the Schwebebahn.

The denouement of the episode of the 1972 ITC TV series The Adventurer called "I'll Get There Sometime" takes place on the railway.

In the "Add-on Wuppertal" DLC[34] of the OMSI 2 bus simulator, there is the option for the player to control the Schwebebahn of the newest model (GTW 15), with all stations faithfully recreated.