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It's wild that something built in 1901 is still not just operational but central to a city's transit system


That’s much more common than one would think. The London tube began operation 160 years ago. The U1 line in Berlin was constructed between 1902 and 1926. The central railway lines are substantially older. The Paris metro began operation in summer 1900.

Bridges in old cities are very often much older than a century.

The ship lift in Niederfinow that connects the Oder-Havel Canal to the Oder river went into operation in 1936 - the canal that it serves dates back to 1743. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiffshebewerk_Niederfinow

The Hoover hydroelectric dam is now 90 years old.


> The U1 line in Berlin was constructed between 1902 and 1926.

There's also the S1 line, large parts of which date back to 1874[0] or even 1838[1], depending on how you count: The train back in 1838 established most of the path today's S1 takes through southwestern Berlin. The S1 runs on a second pair of rails, constructed in 1874, that run in parallel to the 1838 line and diverge from it near the city border. The old 1838 line is set to be rebuilt by 2038.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Railway

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin%E2%80%93Magdeburg_rai...


Wasn't this substantially reconstructed after WW2? This whole area was bombed and then fought through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wuppertal_in_World_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr_pocket


A lot of the rail infrastructure in the UK is older than that - e.g. I use the Forth Bridge quite a lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge


I mean, you could say this of many if not most cities, I would think, for at least some part of the transport system. I can see elements of this from my office window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Kingstown_Railway - it's almost 200 years old. Still carrying a train every few minutes at peak times.

(Obviously a bit of a railway of Theseus at this point, in that besides some of the bridges there's ~no part of it which is literally from 1832.)

This thing is kind of weird in that it's apparently basically been the same route since completion (most old railways ultimately become part of larger systems), but there are other examples; I'm fairly sure that the Glasgow Subway route is ~exactly what it was in 1896 today, say.




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