Qualla: Natur-Park Südgelände

Natur-Park Südgelände: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Assenmacher, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ninety-five species of bee live here, more than sixty of them endangered. Also 366 kinds of fern and seed plant, 49 fungi, 49 birds, 57 spiders, and fourteen species of grasshopper and cricket. None of this was planted. Natur-Park Südgelände is eighteen hectares of former marshalling yard in Schöneberg where the trains stopped running and nobody came back, and what filled the gap between the rails is now one of the richest patches of habitat inside Berlin. Trees have rooted straight into the ballast. Rust-red rails run under moss and disappear into undergrowth. There is a steam locomotive parked in a clearing with trees growing around it.

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Image: Assenmacher | CC BY-SA 3.0

Natur-Park Südgelände: What Grows on Ballast

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hanson59, CC BY-SA 3.0. Railway land is a peculiar habitat: crushed stone, no topsoil to speak of, punishing drainage, decades of trampling and heat, and — crucially — no gardeners. The plants that colonise ground like this are the ruderals, the opportunists of disturbed sites, the same tribe that takes...

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Image: Hanson59 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Natur-Park Südgelände: Why the Trains Stopped

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elfriedeh, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Tempelhof marshalling yard opened in 1889 and was enlarged repeatedly into the 1930s, with a locomotive depot added in 1931. What killed it was politics, not economics. The Anhalter Bahnhof, the great southern terminus this yard fed, was closed in 1952 as the division of the ...

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Image: Elfriedeh | CC BY-SA 4.0

Natur-Park Südgelände: The Neighbours Said No

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dirk Ingo Franke, CC0. In the late 1970s the plan was to build a new freight station on the site, which would have cleared the lot. Local residents organised as the Bürgerinitiative Schöneberger Südgelände and stopped the clearances proposed in 1980; the wider scheme dragged on and was finally abandone...

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Image: Dirk Ingo Franke | CC0

Natur-Park Südgelände: Walking Above the Ground

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elfriedeh, CC BY-SA 4.0. The design solved an obvious problem — how do you let thousands of people into a nature reserve without them wrecking it — with a piece of engineering that fits the place exactly. A steel-grating walkway roughly 600 metres long runs through the protected core, carried on steel pi...

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Image: Elfriedeh | CC BY-SA 4.0

Natur-Park Südgelände: Rust, Water Tower, Sculpture

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dirk Ingo Franke, CC BY-SA 2.0. The hardware stayed. A Class 50 locomotive built in 1940 stands where the depot was, alongside a turntable; two large flying junctions, the flyovers that once let trains cross each other's paths without meeting, survive in the southwest corner. A water tower from 1927 rises about...

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Image: Dirk Ingo Franke | CC BY-SA 2.0