Incredible 1902 footage from a car on Wuppertal, Germany's Flying Train

So how come this German town realized 120 years ago the transportation future we’ve been promised for generations? The system is still in operation, many upgrades later, and is just so cool I wish we had one in my town.

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The footage is very cool, but I didn’t know about the existence of that train, and holy cow! That looks amazing! I’m an American that is not from the east coast, so public transit beyond busses always seems like a miracle.

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I totally get where you’re coming from. I’m from Texas. Any indication of a functioning civil society seems like magic to me.

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Wait, it’s still running? Add riding it to my bucket list.

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Well, I don’t KNOW you two, there is still time! I’ve known Cory since he & the EFF helped me beat ABC/Disney* in a copyright case against violent rhetoric, bigotry, misogyny coming from the RW radio hosts at KSFO in SF. *(Yes, IP lawyers we beat Disney in a copyright case. Remember this when you hear, “Don’t mess with the Mouse.”)

I’ve been talking to/with Xeni lately about how to deal with misinformation about COVID-19 coming from RW radio in Utah. Stay tuned!

I’ve learned from both of them (and Boing Boing!) the importance of understanding the deeper issues of technology and values that one group of people care about vs the money and power another group does.

I also remember to find and bring the funny because dealing with the dark side of the right wing depresses this half-human half-Vulcan.

Keep up the good work. I’m currently a Rear Admiral on BB, but when I reach Admiral, I’ll probably do something to be busted down to Captain. Because Admirals in Star Trek generally suck. I remember telling Admiral Kirk this.

[Spock] If I may be so bold, it was a mistake for you to accept promotion. Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny; anything else is a waste of material.
(Leonard Nimoy - IMDb):
(BTW, I just tried to figure out who actually wrote those lines. Based on the reading of the history of each of the people who were credited with story and screenplay I think it was written by Nicholas Meyer

His shooting screenplay for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) was subtitled “The Undiscovered Country”, which was what William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” called death. This was a metaphor for Spock, who dies in that film. The film was ultimately renamed “The Wrath of Khan” by Paramount executives. When he was signed on to help create Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), he again used the subtitle, but this time it was a metaphor for future peace between two warring galactic superpowers, loosely based on the end of the cold war unfolding at the time.

[on the Star Trek villains] The best villains are the ones that you can understand. And the really great villains are the ones that you root for. One of us is gonna live and one of us is gonna die. And it doesn’t really matter what anyone’s motives are at that point. It’s just Darwin.

I’m not positive he wrote it, but those lines sound like the writing of someone who read and adapted Shakespeare for Star Trek.
LLAP :vulcan_salute:t2:
Spocko
Spocko’s Brain
Hullaballo
Crooks and Liars
@spockosbrain

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Related BBS thread from before:

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I could literally watch 2 hours of this and not get bored.
This is better than any movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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Only a staged photo.

(This was faked with photographic tricks right after the incident. No elephants were harmed in the making of this photo)

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YouTuber “The Tim Traveller” did an episode on this train, if you want a modern look:

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According to this in depth article Tuffi was fine in the original tumble as well. She fell 10m and landed in water that was only 50cm deep but luckily in a muddy patch, so she only had a few bruises on her backside.

To answer your first question: Out of necessity. The town is in a valley and they simply didn’t have the space for the usual tram/trolley solution of the time. So they built this contraption partly over the town’s river, the “Wupper”. If you like public transport built from riveted steel, here is another big machine from roughly the same time:

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Hanging monorails, Airships, INDUSTRY! Imperial Germany was Steampunk before the word existed.

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The two boys driving the wheels down the sidewalk crack me up. Obviously they are a wheelwright’s errand boys but at first glance it looked as if they were playing a giant version of driving the hoop. Or they were transporting a half-size Great Panjandrum.

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Just across the road from this guy:
https://www.denkmal-wuppertal.de/2014/06/friedrich-engels-denkmal.html

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That is up there with the time a gorilla took a trip on the Graff Zeppelin.

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That and Minatur Wunderland are on my itinerary if I ever get to Germany.

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Unfortunately they seem to have missed an opportunity by not making it from tuff

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Well, sure. When you play video back faster than it was recorded, it looks smoother because of all the extra frames.

True, but we have a couple of our own.
image
I only wish we could have the Wuppertal Train here in HI; we had the chance to build a transit system 20 odd years ago, but dropped the ball. The current one is, of course, massively over time and over budget.

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