Funky Frankfurt (Europe 2025 part 3)

Happy boxing day, everyone! Or as we know it in the US, happy day-after-christmas sales day! 🙂 I was out and about shopping for clearance decorations today, and finding a lot less than last year when the Port Angeles Walmart clearly massively over-ordered (and in general a lot less than in years past -- makes me think that the current economic/inflation issues led to stores intentionally under-ordering this year), but we got some cool stuff at Swains, our local Ace Hardware store. Anyway, for this retail-themed holiday, seems like it's about time for another post on here... 

The nice thing about having a direct flight from North America is that we got into Frankfurt in the afternoon, leaving me a bit of time to check out the city before jetlag caught up. We're starting out at Frankfurt Hauptwache station (right down the street from the (boring chain) hotel we were staying at), which has some funky mid-century architecture along with a direct entrance into the Galeria department store next door. This station was built in the 60s and 70s, and it looks to be pretty much untouched from those days! 

Love the 70s stripes!  

 This station is on the Frankfurt City Tunnel, which houses S-bahn (suburban) trains on the middle tracks (which is where we arrived from the airport) and U-bahn (subway) trains on the outer tracks, a fairly unusual layout. 

My goal for the day was just to get a quick look at Frankfurt's transit network and a few of its relatively unusual features, while my parents napped back at the hotel. So I started off by hopping on the U6 out to the end of the line at Ostbahnhof. 

No, the crazy stripes aren't Frankfurt's standard transit livery -- I just happened to get on two wacky ad-wrapped trains (promoting jobs available at the transit agency) in a row! Out at Ostbahnhof was one of the two main things I wanted to check out in person after finding them in Street View -- a very interesting design of tram stops allowing level boarding despite the tram stopping in the middle of the street, by simply raising the car lanes to platform level (leaving a fairly significant dropoff in the middle of the street). I've never seen anything like this elsewhere -- I wouldn't be surprised if other European cities have done this sort of thing, but I highly doubt it would fly in the US! The trams trigger a red light for approaching traffic, allowing everyone boarding and leaving this very busy tram to congregate in the traffic lanes while boarding. 

 This was heading even further out of town, so I just rode one stop along the line. The next one hasn't been upgraded for accessibility, so here the tram does just stop in the middle of the road with signals stopping traffic, similar to a lot of first-generation streetcar lines in the US. 

From there, I took the tram straight back to the historic center of Frankfurt, home to an interesting mix of old and new thanks to the city's post-war reconstruction. 

There's even a U-bahn station (Dom/Romer) with entrances tucked into the (reconstructed) historic buildings, a neat juxtaposition of old and new (albeit rather difficult to find!).  

Out there, it's onto the U5, and on to the strangest bit of Frankfurt's subway system... 

... the part where it's completely street-running for a while! Despite the name, Frankfurt's U-bahn is less of a subway and more of an overgrown version of a North American light rail system, that just happens to use subway-style high-floor trains. It was originally formed by taking parts of the tram network and moving them into tunnels in the city center, while retaining surface-running sections further out... but most of those sections do run in dedicated right-of-way, again like a North American light rail system. However, a section of the U5 line never really grew beyond being a tram, completely running in mixed traffic. Originally, Frankfurt used tram-style vehicles on this line, built to be able to use high platforms in the tunnels and low platforms on the street (similar to what many older North American streetcar systems use, like San Francisco), but for accessibility, they eventually switched over to using the same high-floor trains as the rest of the U-bahn network, with high platforms built for access. 

I have to say, it's a rather bizarre experience standing on such a high platform right next to traffic, being at roof level of the smaller cars passing by. I'm not sure of anywhere else that has something like this -- the closest I can think of is the LA Metro, which uses high-floor trains on light rail lines, but I don't believe they have any stations on true mixed-traffic sections like this. 

Anyway, that's it for this quick post! Right after this I visited the very cool MyZeil mall (where I had dinner that night since I was running out of energy and it was right by the hotel), but I took enough pictures there to make it a full stand-alone tour that will go in with my normal retail sets.