U-Bahn

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U-Bahn is the German abbreviation for Untergrundbahn ("underground railway"), referring to a means of urban rapid transit, known internationally as a "subway", "underground" or "metro". The term was created at the beginning of the 20th century in Berlin, where the Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellschaft ("German state railway company") (predecessor of today's Deutsche Bahn) created a system of urban and suburban railway lines with fast electric trains with short stopping intervals, called the S-Bahn (Schnellbahn, "rapid railway"). The Hochbahngesellschaft ("elevated railway company"), operating elevated and suburban lines, decided they required an equally short and memorable name for their system, and thus called it U-Bahn, for Untergrundbahn ("underground railway"). In Germany the most common symbol for the U-Bahn is a white "U" on a square blue background, in Austria it is on a circular background.

The name was soon adopted for Hamburg's city-owned independent mass transit tram lines. (There was also a Reichsbahn-owned and operated S-Bahn in Hamburg).

Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna fit the criteria for a U-Bahn: fast, electrically operated trains, completely segregated from other traffic. One line of the Frankfurt U-Bahn, the U4, also meets these criteria.

As the post-World War II rebuilding led to wealth and prosperity in West Germany, German car fanaticism motivated many larger city councils to plan the replacement of the traffic-obstructing tramways with U-Bahn systems and bus routes. Nuremberg and Munich decided on a full U-Bahn (like those in Berlin and Hamburg) independent from their existing tramways.

Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Bochum, Essen, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Herne, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Hanover and Bielefeld started to build tunnels for their existing trams, rebuilding tram lines underground. Those systems of tram in tunnels in city centre areas do not meet the criteria of a metro; they are instead light rail systems. Nonetheless, they are usually referred to as U-Bahn. Officially, they are called Stadtbahn ("city railways") or U-Stadtbahn.

During the 1990s, when, according to original planning, the tramways of Nuremberg and Munich were scheduled to disappear, a reorientation process set in. Shortage of money, increased passenger numbers and the insight that larger streets only attract even more cars slowed the building of subway lines and led to a renaissance of the tramways in those cities that had forgotten them. In Nuremberg and Munich, after 30 years new rolling stock was purchased, existing lines were modernised, and new ones were built, leading to new integrated traffic concepts. Today, Berlin, Munich and Nuremberg not only have buses, but also trams, S-Bahn, and U-Bahn systems, each with non-shared tracks and different vehicles.