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And the last day of our stay in Germany has arrived. We took an S-Bahn to Düsseldorf in the early morning, hoping that we can catch something fast to Cologne, to make our stay there longer. Our departure from there to Frankfurt am Main was given, so the earlier we arrive, the longer we stay there.

Düsseldorf

Unfortunately we haven't found anything, but the good thing within the bad was that this gave us some time to go outside of the Hauptbahnhof, and take photos. Photos of trams that is.

This Siemens NF10 is especially of interest to us hungarians: in two years, longer brothers of this car shall run on the  Grand Boulevard routes of Budapest. The one on the picture is 40 meters long, ours will be 53.

A shorter version of that type also exists, called NF8. These were taken into operation only a few weeks ago.

DUEWAG NF-GTL.

A surprise - for me, not expecting old trams in the sleepy sunday morning traffic - was this 1965 DÜWAG GT8...

... with a 1961 four-axle trailer car.

The first time I visited Düsseldorf was in 1989. There were many similar cars in operation - low-floor cars were science-fiction yet. And they're still here! I love these old cars, it was nice to see at least one in such a short time :)

Cologne

My mom used to work and live here, so I love to come back to Cologne, it feels like a second home. Of course back then I wasn't much of a tram enthusiast: I knew the red-white (or sometimes all-over-ad-wearing) trams by sight (there were the "boxy ones" and the "round ones"), but only very rarely had the chance to ride with them, so my knowledge of the Cologne network was very limited. During my visit here in 2002 I rode more trams in one day then in the past 13 years, and that was still not enough!

Despite the fact that we got here quite early, we weren't happy: as you would expect on a morning, lighting conditions were unfavorable, so most of our photos taken at Barbarossaplatz were not too good.

Of course we tried and tried again: there was hardly any car traffic, so at least the disturbing "cars and bikes in front of the tram"-syndrome was absent :-)
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A1985 B100S double-set. We've also seen a pair of the new Bombardier K5000 Stadtbahn-Series, but I was unable to get it right into focus. Not a big deal, we saw many of them later!

Okay, let's leave Barbarossaplatz for...

...  Zoo/Flora, and then over to...

... Mülheim/Wiener Platz. Remark: this is not the same Mülheim as yesterday! The vehicle of course is a K5000, which looked nice in white...

... but rather disadvantagous in this new official livery!

The interior of a K5000. Ummm, interesting colors!

I seem to remember when this station was rebuilt and equipped with an elevator leading up to the flyover bridge of Severinstrasse. That was around '89 or 90 (or was that just an overhaul of the elevator that I witnessed?). I've found it amazing to see an elevator at a tram stop - in Hungary it's still not a common thing! Everything here seemed shiny and modern - now the whole scenery looked a bit worn-out. I wonder what those yellow tube/bars between the rails are. Are they spreaders?

K4000 on the south side of Neumarkt, with a double-set of K4000 partly-low-floor tramcars.

Unfortunately we've only had a very limited ammount of time to spend here, so we were forced to get going. In the underground station at the Hauptbahnhof I took a few last photos of Stadtbahn cars...

... and then ran up to the central station. We continued our way with an ICE3 high-speed train to Frankfurt am Main, but before leaving, I took this photo of the Cologne Cathedral, seen through the glass roof of the central station. These six days went by very fast, I hope next time I'll have more time to spend here!

The End