Brian Melican revels in the beautiful simplicity of Berlin’s S-Bahn…

How do you get from Schöneberg to Prenzlauer Berg using the S-Bahn? Don’t worry—it’s not a trick question. The quick way is the S1 heading north with a change at Gesundbrunnen or Bornholmer Straße; the scenic route is even easier, involving nothing more strenuous than getting on the S41 or the S42 and sitting still for half an hour.

You might be wondering why I asked something that simple. Well, let’s do a similar exercise in London: try getting from Balham to Stoke Newington and then let me know how that works out for you. Or let’s take Paris and say you want to get from Ivry to the 17th arrondissement: manage that in under an hour and I’ll owe you a vin rouge.

So why am I treating you like an overtaxed online transport app? It’s a roundabout way of showing how relatively easy public transport in Berlin is; which in turn is a round-about way of indicating just how instrumental railways have been in Berlin’s history.

London and Paris were both massive metropolitan centres by the time trains arrived in Berlin, meaning that big ideas such as high-speed overground railways encircling the city or cross-town link schemes were already de-facto impossible for them. From the inception of railways, it took Paris over 100 years to start linking its main termini with proper trains; London is only just moving on to Crossrail.

In Berlin, things were essentially the other way round. The hugely practical Ringbahn that draws a circle around the city centre was built in the 1870s on what was mostly greenfield land; Berlin’s growth spurt only really got going after they’d built it.

Tracking Berlin History

Hence a ride on the S-Bahn today is simultaneously a journey through Berlin’s history, tracing the city’s impressively rapid transformation from capital of Prussia to capital of Germany.

It’s of course hard to imagine what the Schnell-Bahn meant to the first generations of passengers who used it. But in terms of its technological prowess and the effect it had on how people experienced and saw their city, the S-Bahn was presumably like a cross between high-speed rail and a smartphone: like the TGV or the Eurostar, it rearranged mental geography by bringing far away places temporally closer.

And like a smartphone, it became something of a symbol of its age. Especially following electrification in the 1920s, the ‘S’ in S-Bahn stood not only for schnell, but for sleek, smooth and nearly silent. In the literature of the time, it was associated with progress and modernity, and became part of the “Berlin feel” of the 20s and 30s that so attracted foreign writers to Germany: ‘Already we were sweeping through Charlottenburg. We passed the station without halting and on the platforms, with the old and poignant feeling of loss and of regret, I saw the people waiting for the Stadtbahn train,’ wrote Thomas Wolfe in I Have A Thing To Tell You (1937).

The large ‘S’ on a green background was an instantly recognisable brand that literally shone out into the dark skies of the dirty, coal-fired city, promising a clean, elect…