Vienna U-Bahn - History

History

Compared to other underground railways worldwide, the Vienna U-Bahn is young. The question of whether to build a Vienna U-Bahn was the subject of heated debate for over one hundred years. From 1844 to the 1960s, numerous mass train transport plans were discussed, ignored or simply rejected.

The first system to be constructed was a 4-line Stadtbahn railway network (originally projected as 3 main and 3 local lines) using steam trains. Ground was broken in 1892, and the system was opened in stages between 11 May 1898 and 6 August 1901. At Hütteldorf, the Stadtbahn connected to railway service to the west, and at Heiligenstadt, to railway service on the Franz Josef Line, which then ran eastwards within the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Eger. Some of the Jugendstil stations for this system designed by Otto Wagner are still in use. However, the Stadtbahn proved inadequate for mass transport, less successful than the tramway. Starting in 1910, plans were considered for an underground system, but were interrupted by the First World War, which also necessitated closing the Stadtbahn to civilian use. After the war, the economic situation of a smaller and poorer country ruled out continuing with the plan. However, starting on 26 May 1924 the Stadtbahn was electrified, something that many had called for before the war, and from autumn 1925 it was integrated with the tramway rather than the railways. The frequency of trains tripled. Plans for a U-Bahn dating to 1912–14 were revived and discussions took place in 1929, but the Great Depression again necessitated abandoning planning.

Both in 1937 and after the Anschluß, when Vienna became the largest city by surface area in the Third Reich, ambitious plans for a U-Bahn, as well as a new central railway station, were discussed. Test tunnelling took place, but these plans, too, had to be shelved when the Second World War broke out.

Severe war damage caused the Stadtbahn system to be suspended in some areas until 27 May 1945. The redevelopment of stations took until the 1950s. Meanwhile, Vienna was occupied by the four allied powers until 1955, and in 1946 had returned three quarters of the pre-war expanded Greater Vienna to the state of Lower Austria. Two proposals for U-Bahn systems were nonetheless presented, in 1953 and 1954. Increasing car traffic led to cutbacks in the S-Bahn network that were partially made up for by buses. There was also an unfortunate politicisation of the U-Bahn issue: in the 1954 and 1959 city council elections, the conservative Austrian People's Party championed construction of a U-Bahn, but the more powerful Social Democratic Party of Austria campaigned for putting housing first. The city council repeatedly rejected the U-Bahn idea in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Extensions of the Stadtbahn system had always been discussed as an alternative to building a new U-Bahn. But it was not until the late 1960s, when the Stadtbahn and the Schnellbahn were no longer able to adequately serve the ever-increasing public traffic, that the decision to build a new network was taken. On 26 January 1968, the city council voted to begin construction of a 30 km basic network (Grundnetz). Construction began on 3 November 1969 on and under Karlsplatz, where three lines of the basic network were to meet, and where central control of the U-Bahn was initially located. Test operation began on 8 May 1976 on line U4, and the first newly constructed (underground) stretch of line opened on 25 February 1978 (five stations on U1 between Reumannplatz and Karlsplatz).

The construction of the Vienna U-Bahn network can be divided into several stages: