Emslandplan I - Monorail

Within my ongoing longterm project Emslandplan I work on the current state and development of the district Emsland in the German state of Lower Saxonia. Being one of the biggest districts in Germany but mostly covered by bogland, it has been considered the nation's poorhouse until the mid of the 20th century. With the end of World War II and the influx of people from the former eastern territories of Germany the need for agricultural and inhabitable land as well as the discovery of extensive oil and gas resources lead to the foundation of the Emslandplan. Between 1950 and 1989 more than 2 billion DM were spend on infrastructure, drainage projects, and other development measures. By today the former underdeveloped agricultural region flourishes and became a diversified industrialised area. This succesful development made it a rare exception of increasing rural depopulation in Germany. However, the destructions of the bogland comes with a price just as the nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel production in Lingen. I plan to document the remains of the Emslandplan, its stories of success and failure, its people, and perspectives.

Transrapid is the pioneering maglev train which was developed by a joint venture of Siemens and ThyssenKrupp at the Emsland test facility between Lathen and Dörpen. After four years of construction the facility has been operating between 1984 and 2011. The approval of technical readiness for application of the trains which reach a speed of up to 500km/h was given in 1991. In 2006 it made it into the headlines when 23 people died in a crash between a train and a service vehicle parked on the 31.5km long track. Today development of the pioneering thechnology has been put on hold for roughly a decade and the test site with its mostly elevated tracks is set for demolition. The only Transrapid in commercial operation connects Shanghai Pudong International Airport and Longyang Road Station in the outskirts of central Pudong, Shanghai.