page_title: Essen Stadtbahn
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Essen Stadtbahn / History
caption_attribution_description: Essen Stadtbahn
context_page_description: The Essen Stadtbahn is a 19.6-kilometer light rail network in Essen and the two neighbouring towns of Mülheim an der Ruhr and Gelsenkirchen in the German state of North Rhine Westphalia. It forms part of the Rhine-Ruhr Stadtbahn.
  Like the Frankfurt U-Bahn, it is a mixed system of light rail and underground railway. One of its three lines, U18, runs completely free of intersections with other traffic. The other two lines are partly tramlines and partly underground lines. The sections of tramline have only a few sections that have no intersections with road traffic.
  Like all urban public transport in Essen, the Essen Stadtbahn is operated by Ruhrbahn, a company owned by the Cities of Essen and Mülheim an der Ruhr. The transport companies of neighbouring municipalities are also involved with the operation of some lines under concessions.
context_section_description: During the building of the first tramline in Essen in 1893, planning began on a partially underground railway, which was not realised until decades after the Second World War. The first preliminary line of the current Stadtbahn emerged in the early 1960s and were laid partly as tram tracks on the median strip of the Ruhrschnellweg (“Ruhr Expressway”), which is exactly where the modern line U18 runs. In this case, an underground Stadtbahn (U-Stadtbahn) was not initially planned. Construction work on the tram line in the Ruhr Expressway was carried out simultaneously with the upgrade of the Ruhr Expressway itself, since the latter up to that time had only three lanes and flat junctions and had insufficient capacity because of the large increase in traffic. Following the upgrade of other forms of public transport, the possibility of some form of public transport on the Ruhr Expressway were considered, including express buses on a separate bus lane. Ultimately, however, an option based around a rapid tramway gained favour. Thus a line was built on parts of today's Essen–Mülheim route, which was initially connected by temporary exit ramps with the rest of the tram network.
  The plans for a tunnel under the centre of Essen replacing an above-ground tram line began in 1961. Again, there were considerations of relieving the above-ground tramway and congestion in the quite small Essen inner city (about 1,400 × 700 metres), which suffered from increasing traffic. The initial solutions ranged similarly from the retention of the surface tramway with the creation of a new centralised node, up to the creation of a pure U-Bahn (metro) system as in Berlin and Hamburg. For various reasons, however, it was agreed to build an underground tramway with the possibility of future upgrade to a full U-Bahn. The idea of building a pure U-Bahn system at once was considered, but discarded due to the need to handle the existing passenger flows linking the tramway systems of the neighbouring cities of the Ruhr.
  Soon after that actual planning started on the tunnels in the city centre. The planning was carried out simultaneously on the construction of a highway tunnel for the Ruhr Expressway underneath the inner city. In the end, the so-called Y-Lösung ("Y solution") was adopted under which the Essen Hauptbahnhof Stadtbahn station became a central, four-track junction station serving all lines, which a branch in the north to the northeast and the northwest. The first construction project was the establishment of the shell of Planckstraße station in 1964, which was later used for the connection to the existing above-ground tram line to Margarethenhoehe. The first section of the underground tram line to go into operation, however, was a 552-metre-long urban tunnel section through Saalbau station, opened on 5 October 1967. This was also the first part of the entire underground tram (U-Straßenbahn) network of the Rhine-Ruhr region, since Saalbau station was also the first underground railway station in North Rhine-Westphalia.
  The next phase of construction was the building of the continuous Stadtbahn line from Essen to Mülheim along the Ruhr Expressway, which, as has already been mentioned, was partly built in the 1960s. This route was considered a "model line" for the other Stadtbahn construction projects. On 28 May 1977, the opening of a nearly eight kilometre-long, continuous connection between Mülheim-Heißen and the Essen inner city took place, including the underground stations of Heißen Kirche in Mülheim city and the metro stations of Bismarckplatz, Essen Hauptbahnhof and Wiener Platz (now Hirschlandplatz) in Essen. This was the first Stadtbahn line of the network that was completely independent of the tram network to be opened. Porscheplatz (now called Rathaus Essen) Stadtbahn station was also put into operation on 28 May 1977; it was (and still is) operated by trams. The commissioning of the remaining five underground stations in Mülheim followed on 3 November 1979.
  In 1981, the route of line U17 to Margarethenhoehe was put into operation. This inc
caption: Karlsplatz station, built in 2001
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