Hello, Guten Tag, and Juten Tach!
It is a gorgeous sunny day
and I’m on Line 5 of the Berlin S-Bahn,
heading right out to the eastern end of the line
and the lakeside town of Strausberg.
And I’m here visiting my friend Niamh
- Hi!
who is originally from Ireland, but now lives in Berlin.
And today Niamh has made the mistake
of allowing me to choose where we’re going for an afternoon out.
So I’ve chosen Strausberg,
partly because it’s genuinely a nice place for a trip out from Berlin,
but also because of THIS.
Ok, admittedly that is just an overhead electric wire,
and you’ve all seen those before, on railways, or trams or trolleybuses.
But this is Europe’s last remaining example
of an overhead electrified ferry.
(aside) Wait.
When did we ever have those?
This is Strausberg, a historic fortified town
that stands on the Straussee lake, 30km east of Berlin.
The old town walls here date right back to the mid-1200s,
as do parts of the local church,
and famous former residents include Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space,
who retired and spent the final years of his life here.
But the town really developed in the late 1800s,
with the arrival of the Strausberg Railway
making it a popular day trip (and retirement) destination for Berliners.
And in 1894, the year after the railway opened,
a local man decided to launch a ferry service across the lake.
- [Niamh] This dude.
"Kaufmann Daniel Gepke".
- [Tim] "Der Strausberger Kaufmann Daniel Gepke".
I think "Daniel" is his name, right?
Not "Kaufmann".
- [Niamh] I don’t know.
I like the idea that his name is "Kaufmann Daniel Gepke".
Turns out his name is not "Kaufmann".
He may not have been called Kaufmann,
but he was *a* Kaufmann,
which translates into English as a businessman.
Mr Gepke had seen all the day-trippers flooding into Strausberg
and saw an opportunity to build a brand new lakeside bathing resort and restaurant.
So he did.
The only problem was he built it on the other side of the lake.
And to get his customers over there, he was going to need a boat.
The first Straussee ferry was not electric.
In fact it had to be hauled across the lake by hand, using a winch and a rope.
But let’s fast forward 10 years to 1904 -
and there is both good and bad news for Mr Gepke.
The good news is his lakeside resort has proved so popular with tourists
that he’s had to upgrade the original boat to a bigger petrol-powered one.
The bad news is...
he’s now dead, at the age of 61,
and his family have sold the ferry to the local authorities.
By now, Strausberg had become quite a desirable place to live
and some of the posher inhabitants had started to complain
about all the noise and fumes coming from the boat.
Meanwhile the local fisherman were complaining that it was killing all the fish.
So the authorities had to do something,
but they didn’t really want to lose the income from the tourists and the ferry.
And that’s they came up with a brilliant idea:
why not try running it on electricity?
- Hallo, Guten Tag!
Ein einzelfahrt fur zwei Personen bitte.
- 3€20.
The idea of running a boat on electricity was not new even then;
battery-powered boats had been around for about twenty years,
for example, this map of the river Thames shows electric charging points in 1889.
But Strausberg didn’t want a battery-powered boat that would need charging;
they had a better idea.
And instead, they strang up a live 170-volt electric wire
from one side of the lake to the other,
and then attached the ferry to it,
using the connector from an early trolleybus.
This cable powers a motor on board the boat,
which then pulls it along a sort of track made out of two more cables.
- There's a sort of cable that runs from the bank here and then…
I don’t know, does it go through and out the other side?
- I think you’re right.
So this cable coming down the side here
goes down the side of the boat as well
and then you can see it coming off the front the boat going into the water.
That’s what keeps the boat travelling in the right direction.
In other words, it works pretty much like a normal cable ferry,
except the overhead cable is live,
and the two lower cables complete the electrical circuit.
Which means to a physicist,
the ferry is both grounded and floating in the water.
Which is confusing.
And after a few years of testing,
a couple of snapped cables,
and a bit of help from a little local company in Berlin by the name of 'Siemens',
the town officially launched the world’s first overhead wire electric ferry in 1915.
The boat that you see today is not the original one -
this is 'Steffi', who has been doing the job since 1967.
But the point is Strausberg has had an overhead electrified ferry
for more than 100 years.
Now obviously, overhead electrified ferries wouldn’t work everywhere;
you can’t really put one of these across a busy shipping lane,
and there have to be strict height limits for all the other boats on the Straussee.
But if you’ve got a ferry that’s just doing the same short trip back and forth,
and there’s not really any other traffic to worry about…
this isn’t a bad idea.
The boat never has to stop to recharge or refuel
and the water remains clean enough to bathe in.
So maybe the question we should be asking
is not why did they build this,
but why didn’t overhead electrified ferries catch on anywhere else?
Well actually, they did!
A bit.
Viewers in northwest Oregon
(statistically there’s got to be some of you)
may be familiar with the electric ferries that operate on the Willamette river;
one at Canby, and one at Buena Vista,
and there used to be another one in between at Wheatland,
but that now runs on diesel.
And there used to be another one in Germany too,
in a place called Hassmersheim,
but that’s now been replaced by a bridge.
Anyway, if we expand from just ferries
and we include other types of boat,
there are electrified sections of canal in France
which are used by electric tug boats.
In fact the Straussee Ferry itself may have been inspired by a similar electric tug boat
that was tested on the other side of Berlin between 1903 and 1910.
Aaaaand if we expand from overhead electric wires
and we include underwater electric wires,
there are also ferries that connect directly to the mains
using what are essentially long extension cords,
including that one in Denmark that half of you know about already,
because you saw Tom Scott’s video about it.
And there may be even more examples out there that I haven’t mentioned.
If you know any more electric boats that use a live wire instead of batteries,
then you know what to do:
tell us about them in the comments,
starting with the words "well actually...".
But if all you want to do is come and travel on what I’m pretty sure
is Europe’s first - and last remaining - overhead wire electric ferry,
Strausberg is roughly one hour from central Berlin on the S-Bahn, via line 5,
and the ferry is less than a 10 minute walk from the station.
A single ticket will cost you €1.70 full fare or €1.30 for concessions,
and the ferry is fully accessible for wheelchairs and pushchairs.
There are departures every half hour,
and the journey across the lake takes about 5 minutes,
while a hike back around the lake should take you about 45 minutes.
And as always, thank you very much for watching,
and I’ll see you soon.