What a lot there is to find in Berlin’s underground. Not only cellars, kilometre-long pipelines or sewers can be found here – here you can also find buried underground tunnels or underground tunnels that were built and never used. Come with us into the Eisack tunnel and deep under Innsbrucker Platz.
We went underground in Berlin with TunnelTours and found hidden places.
The meeting point for this guided tour around the Eisack Tunnel was at the Innsbrucker Platz underground station. Already here we learned a lot about the Berlin underground network. The Innsbrucker Platz underground station (Line U4) was built in 1909/1910 when Schöneberg decided to build its own underground. Originally, this station was only a temporary terminus. It was planned to extend the line to the south.
Just south of Innsbrucker Platz was the above-ground operating site of the Schöneberg underground. The wagons travelled through a tunnel underneath Eisackstraße to the company premises. Today, this tunnel can no longer be discovered in the Innsbrucker Platz underground station; the entrance was closed in 1932 when the company premises were dissolved in the course of the merger of the Berlin and Schöneberg undergrounds.
What few people know, however, is that part of the Eisack tunnel still exists. Through an entrance in the courtyard of a residential complex, we were able to climb into the depths. Directly under the residential buildings, a tunnel section of about 200 metres has been preserved. There are no more rails here, but everywhere you can still discover interesting details that indicate how it was used. In the light of the torches, which you absolutely have to bring along for this exploration, we could discover, for example, holders for electric cables, signs for safety when working in the tunnel and old electrical boxes. It was good that our attention was drawn here to the many details that would otherwise have escaped a non-subway expert.
Something special came to our camera lens during the tour of the old tunnel.
It seems to haunt the Eisack tunnel. This little ghost appeared in one of our photos. It’s a good thing I didn’t notice it on the spot.
After a detailed and really very informative tour, we went back to the Innsbrucker Platz underground station. Through a door for the operating staff, we entered an area that completely amazed me. We were standing in the shell of a lower-level underground station.
When construction work on the city ring road began between 1971 and 1978, large areas of Innsbrucker Platz had to be changed. A large distribution level was built between the road surface and the motorway tunnel, and a tunnel partition prevented the planned extension of the underground to the south. Instead, a shell was built for a station of the underground line U10. This line, which was never built, was to run from Weißensee via Alexanderplatz, Potsdamer Platz to Steglitz and Lichterfelde.
Stairs take you down into the depths and you actually find an almost finished underground station here. The tracks are missing and there are no escalators here either, but the tunnel construction of the station looks as if it wouldn’t be long before an underground could run here. It is a pity that this line has not been built until today and that the building fabric here has certainly suffered greatly over time.
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