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Interurban Tramway in Upper Silesia/Poland

Discussion in 'International Heritage Railways/Tramways' started by Fenway, Aug 30, 2020.

  1. Fenway

    Fenway New Member

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    The densely populated and heavily industrialized region of Upper Silesia in southern Poland has a unique and very scenic interurban tramway system with 178 km of network size. This area is the Polish equivalent of the Rhine-Ruhr area in Germany.

    After World War I and from 1922 to 1939, the Polish-German border was very complicated and Upper Silesia was actually also split into a western German and eastern Polish part. The German part was based on Gleiwitz (Gliwice), the Polish area on Katowice. After Hitler came to power and things got worst around Europe in the late 1930s, the Poles started to fortify their border with a line of concrete bunkers and defence installations. The area is not exactly easy to defence, since it is all flat and basically one city was in one country and right next to it the next city in a different country.

    Many of these old bunkers have been preserved and some also renovated. The most prominent one is perhaps No. 5 in Chorzow, right on the periphery with Bytom. Since 1945 all of Upper Silesia has been in Poland, so these old bunkers no longer guard the Polish border, they are just objects of military history and remnants of the 1930s. Bunker No. 5 is prominent because the interurban tramway passes right by it and every few minutes a streetcar whisks by. The bunker is not even so prominently noticeable to travellers looking at their mobile phone, not least because of it's painted camouflage colors.

    Here is a short clip from this rather unique stretch of tram line:

     

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