We return to East Berlin for this edition of “Around the World in Trams”.
Whilst a lot of the trams we’ll see during this stay in East Berlin are in the simple cream livery many of the Tatra products were in a brighter red and white livery. That includes ČKD Tatra KT4D 219 069-4 and an unidentified sister car which are seen in this image on a working of route 18 from U-Bahnhof Stadion der Weltjugend to Ahrensfelde, shortly after curving out of Friedrichstrasse. Even for a Sunday morning the streets of East Berlin are remarkably traffic-free.
The KT4Ds were four-axle articulated cars, built in Czechoslovakia from 1977, with a prototype having emerged two years earlier. Production ceased in the 1990s. The Ahrensfelde terminus was in the north east of the city, while the Stadion der Weltjugend terminus was interesting in that the underground station it purported to serve had been closed since 1961. In 1979 it was one of the heavily-protected ‘ghost stations’ beneath East Berlin on a route that served stations in West Berlin at both ends. The station reopened in 1990 and has reverted to its former name of Schwartzkopffstrasse.
Photograph by Donald Brooks, 20th May 1979