Greetings, Wolgfgang.
A couple of months ago we went through a discussion about this bridge,
and how far below it West Berliner sovereignty extended, or if the
tracks directly under the bridge were West, meaning that when the
trains passed under the bridge, that they passed through west
territory for perhaps the 5 meters that the bridge above was wide.
People didn't want to believe that sovereignty could extend only to a
surface or for a particular distance below and then, at a given depth
have another country's sovereignty below that. You assert there was
an agreement about that - that the bridge was west and the ground
below east.
I have a letter from the Senator fur Bau und Wohnungswesen from 1985,
where I wrote and asked that question. He sent me a copy of the
agreement with East Germany about the Steinstuecken corridor, and very
detailed maps - but couldn't answer the question definitively. He
sent a copy of the treaty, but said the question wasn't addressed
there - which, atfer reading it, I agreed with. Where did you get the
info that the ground was East? If the tracks pass through the
southern portion of Steinstucken (i.e., the train is in the west for a
short distance at the south side of Steinstuecken, why would the train
not just as easily pass through the west twice, once at the south side
and the second time when it was under the road bridge on the north
side. How about the footbridge that crosses the tracks in the
middle of Steinstuecken, that led over the tracks from the East half
of Steinstuecken to the West half near the helicopter denkmal? Why
would the treatymakers not just split Steinstuecken into two pieces,
split by the tracks? Why leave only a portion of the tracks in the
east? If a train crashed, over portions of track that belonged to both
"sides", what a mess? Just like the PanAm flight the crashed inside
the Air Control zone of West Berlin but which hit the ground in the
east. The East Germans wouldn't let the westerners to the site,
because the air corridor had a lower limit of altitude - and thus,
once it hit the ground, it had left the western corridor - except that
the treaty didn't mention that the circle-shaped air traffic control
area over Berlin (and parts of the East) were part of the "tube of
air" that formed the corridors themselves.
If you could point me to the document that regulated the limits
of depth to which the sovereignty of the west descended below the
bridge, I'd sure appreciate it.
Regards
Len Nadybal
Washington DC
--- In BoundaryPoint@y..., "anorak222" <wolfi.junkmail@s...> wrote:
> One detail I forgot to mention:
>
> On the steinstuecken_1975 map, at the northern end of the enclave at
> the point where the corridor enters, a road branches off to the
left.
> If you look closely you see that it is drawn "above" a deep border
> dent. This is actually a road bridge above a railway line. The 1972
> agreement was that a good portion of the railway line through
> Steinstücken would belong to East Germany (hence the dent), whilst
> the road bridge above would belong to West Berlin. Few maps show
this
> accurately, this is one which does.