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| Arriving
BY AIR
Most travelers arrive in Berlin at Tegal Airport in the northwest suborbs (the former French sector), a 20 minute cab from the main hotels tha tcosts about 25 Deutsche marks. Allow extra time for morning and eveni9ng rush hours, for reunification has brought serious traffic jams to the once isolated city. The second main airport is Schonefeld, in the southeastern part of the city, also a fast cab ride from the center. (A third airport, Tempelhof, with its Third Reich architecture and momories of the postwar Berlin airlight , remioaned largely in the hands of the U.S military adn serves short-range feeder lines on the civilian side). Tegel and Schonefied have been refurbished since 1990,.
Tegel handles six million passengers a year adn has a restaurant, two snack bars, a pub, a supermarket, a perfumery, a bank counter, and a post office. The Berlin Tourist Office runs a counter in the main hall. Check there first for hotl accommodations. An airport bus connects then airport and Bahnhof Zoo station every 20 minutes. Tegel is passenger-friendly, with only a few steps seperating the drop-off point for cab and bus passengers and the check in counters.
schonefeld is adding a new departure hall for the expected doubling of flights and passengers. there is a tram connection to westernBerlin (one hour trvel time) with bus connections every 20 minutes to city center hotels, Potsdam, and Tegel airport, From Schoniofied it takes one and half to two hours to drive, to Dresden, Leipzig, or Chemnitz.
BY RAIL
Speed is not yet the other of the day between Berlin and the major cities of the western part of Germany. The Soviet catred off part of the Hannover line via Magdeburg after World War II, leaving a one-way track with speeds limited to 100 kph about 62mph (and that on short stretches) and a journey time of four to five hours. Train times, west to east, dropped to below prewar levels: four hours from Berlin to Hamburg compared to two and half hours at the beginning of hostilities. Electrification is coming to Hannover-Berlin in 1993-94, with a brand new, 300kph line scheduled for 1997. An ICE high-speed train is already running from Humburg to Munich. There's a need for more locomotives and more drivers. Luckily, estern locomotives, recently testedby the Bundesbahn in the Black Forest and Switzerland, have been found to be adaptable to western electric lines. Normal European speeds will have to wait but the Bundesbahn introduced more comfortable iontercity trains to Berlin in the summer of 1991. Unitl then, the most comfortable intercity service was the Johann Sebastian Bach special from Frankfurt to Leipzig. Heinz Durr, the new Bundesbahn boss, has th etask of upgrading east-west rail services after decdes of emphasis (in both of hte former, divided Germany) on north-south links. These improvements will enable Berlin to look east and west for trade adn traffic with greater confidence and else.
BY CAR
As with rail trave, purely political barriers have vanished but infranstructure problems remain. Berlin itself has multilane ring roads, but the old eastern roads beyond are jsut that old. Above all surfaces need to eb repaired, lanes added for the expected jump in east-west passenger and truck trffic.
the 110 millioms from Berlin to Helmstedt, the former inner German border, still takes often three and half hours. A horrendous backup of traffic greeted reunification in 1990 with bizerre queues of Mercedes Bensas, Trabants, BMWs, and Wartburgs. TheBerlin highway became known as "the World's longest traffic jam". Motorists heading for frunkfurt and other westdern airports often mised their flights. So the drive is for those with time to spare. on other side of Berlin, the Polish border is a mere 40 miles away via Frankfurt on the Oder River.
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