Talk:Berlin S-Bahn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Rapid transit, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rapid transit on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

	Germany Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Germany, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles related to Germany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
Germany To-do: edit  Here are some tasks you can do: Requests: Erfurt Cathedral, Hans-Ulrich Klose, Manfred Kanther, Die Feuerzangenbowle Copyedit: Kleinstaaterei, Die Räuber, Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst, Neu-Ulm Unreferenced: Franz Josef Jung, Limburger Dom, High German languages, Matthias Erzberger, Christmas pyramid Cleanup: Heidelberg, Bremerhaven, Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, Düsseldorf-Volmerswerth, Frankfurt Book Fair Stubs: Federal Ministry of the Interior (Germany), Heinz Erhardt, Erich Ribbeck, Kronach, Tegernsee (lake), Römisch-Germanisches Museum NPOV: Erich von Manstein, Anti-German sentiment, Willy Brandt, German Visa Affair 2005 Portal maintenance: Update News, Did you know, announcements, and suggest Selected article and picture Other: Help tag Germany-related articles with the project template and assess their quality

	Trains Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Trains, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rail transport on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
	See also: WikiProject Trains to do list
	This article lacks sufficient references and/or adequate inline citations.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale. (assessment comments)
Mid	This article has been rated as mid-importance within the Trains WikiProject.

WikiProject Echo has identified Berlin S-Bahn as a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the Serbian language Wikipedia.

Caroline, shall we mention -- for those of us who don't sprechen any Deutsch that the U and S things are underground and surface railways systems?

I'm also thinking of moving the U-bahn and S-bahn articles to more English-sounding names. But I'd like to hear what you think, first. --Uncle Ed 20:57, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

In the absence of any objections, I plan to merge both articles into List of Berlin metro stations -- using for my model the title of List of Lisbon metro stations.

I hope we can link all these metro/underground/subway/commuter rail articles in some organized way. --Uncle Ed 16:08, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I notice that no one has objected to these year-old comments, and that the proposed move hasn't happened anyway, but I'd still like to register my objections to the proposal:

• The origin of the "U" in U-Bahn may be "unterground", but there are extensive elevanted and at-grade sections.
• The origin of the "S" in S-Bahn is actually not entirely clear. Some say it's "stadtbahn" (city train), others "schnellbahn" (fast train). Whatever it is, it doesn't have anything to do with "surface" and in fact the S-Bahn too has extensive underground sections.
• There really isn't any "more English-sounding" name for these systems that would be useful as an identifier. "U-Bahn" and "S-Bahn" have in essence become proper nouns borrowed freely into English. I'm a native English speaker who lived in Berlin for some months and the English-speaking expats there universally said "U-Bahn" and "S-Bahn".
• The two systems, while interconnected and interrelated, are also distinct both historically and operationally, and should have their own articles.

--Jfruh 19:53, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree with the last comments. There are some things that just can´t be translated. The terms U-Bahn and S-Bahn are nationally known in Germany, similar to Subway in the USA. This is different to the UK situation where the Term "Underground" is only valid for the LUL system in London. Greetings from BerlinIsarSteve 11:07, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

@Jfru:

• "U-Bahn" stands for "Untergrundbahn".
• "S-Bahn" stands for "Stadtschnellbahn". It was originally proposed as "SS-Bahn" (that was before the nazi era), but one of the S got dropped early on. This is well documented.

Anorak2 11:43, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] American Forces under Four-Power Occupation

I know anecdotally (from having been there at the time) that Western occupation forces were forbidden to ride the S-Bahn during the latter portion of the Four Power days, due to its GDR control. I think that this needs to be in the article, but my having been there could conceivably represent original research and would love for someone to document this from a published source.