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The German city with an incredible upside down railway

(CNN) — Sus­pen­sion rail­ways today seem like an anach­ronism -- a 19th-century vision of what the future of trans­port would look like. By the year 2022, surely we would all be com­muting to work on upside down railways!

Unlike boring ordi­nary train lines that stay determinedly fixed to terra firma, suspension railways dangle beneath a track sus­pended from pylons. Their carriages swoosh over roads, rivers and other obstructions, while passengers get to enjoy the view.

The idea, ironi­cally, never really got off the ground despite a few suc­cess­ful if short-lived ventures like the Braniff Jet­rail Fastpark Sys­tem that whisked pas­sen­gers from parking lot to ter­minal at Dallas Love Field for four years before the air­port closed in 1974.

Today, the only suspension railways in operation are to be found in Japan and Germany. And it's in Germany that the original, and still very much the best, can still be found still going strong in all its steampunk glory -- the Wuppertal Schwebebahn.

It all began in the 1880s, in the after­glow of impe­rial Germany's so-called Grün­der­zeit era of rapid indus­trial expansion. Entre­preneur and engi­neer Eugen Langen had been expe­ri­menting with a suspension rail­way for moving goods at his sugar fac­tory in Cologne.

Meanwhile, the nearby city of Wuppertal had a problem. A booming local textile industry had seen the area grow from a small collection of settlements along the Wupper river to an urban sprawl of 40,000 inhabitants who now needed to get around.

Because the long and winding river valley made tradi­tional rail or tram­ways impos­sible, city officials invited pro­posals to solve the problem -- and up popped Langen.

In 1893, he offered his suspension rail­way system to the city, which leapt at the pro­posal. Con­struc­tion began in 1898 and the line was ceremoniously opened in 1901, with Emperor Wilhelm II taking a test ride with wife Auguste Viktoria.

In 1950, the Schwe­bebahn had its most famous pas­sen­ger to date, even more high-profile than the Kaiser: Tuffi the elephant.

The Althoff Circus was in town and had arranged a promotional trip for the young pachy­derm, who was a minor celebrity in West Germany at the time. Tuffi was typically fearless around people, so circus owner Franz Althoff regularly used her to advertise his show.

She'd already ridden on trams, drunk from a holy water fountain, delivered crates of beer to construction workers and, somewhat less heroically, eaten a bouquet of flowers and urinated on a Persian carpet.

First her Schwebebahn trip seemed to go just fine. She boarded the train at Wuppertal-Barmen station (where Althoff had to purchase four tickets for Tuffi and one for himself).

But the carriage was crowded with journalists and officials, so when Tuffi tried to turn after a few minutes, she couldn't and panicked. First she trampled a row of seats and then jumped through a window into the river 10 meters (33 feet) below.

The river was only 50 centimeters (20 inches) deep at that location but the ground was muddy, so Tuffi suffered only a few scrapes. Althoff had, apparently, wanted to jump after her, but instead continued to the next stop from where he ran back to the dazed elephant and led it back to the circus camp.

A statue made from basalt created in 2020 by artist Bernd Bergkemper sits in the exact spot where Tuffi landed in 1950.