Stellwerk Köln-Dünnwald

The Stellwerk Köln-Dünnwald is a museum of railway signal and telecommunications technology in the Dünnwald district of Cologne. It stands on the site of the former Köln-Dünnwald station, once a busy junction where trains from Cologne-Kalk and Opladen met. Two mechanical signal boxes controlled the tracks until 1970, when a DrS2 route-setting box took over. By 2010 the site had been reduced to a block post guarding level crossings before the whole station closed. The building now houses displays built around two restored signal boxes. The first is the original DrS2 push-button box with its relays visible behind glass. The second is an early electronic box from Essen-Kupferdreh, a SIMIS B unit built in 1991 and one of the last of its kind to be withdrawn by Deutsche Bahn. A third section shows how railway staff communicated, with a full telephone exchange reconstructed exactly as it once stood. Visitors walk through the operating room where the DrS2 levers and buttons remain in place. The Essen-Kupferdreh box sits beside it, its screens and keyboards still able to light up and show trains moving. The telephone room shows switchboards and headsets as they were used to coordinate trains across the network. Outside, the old station area and its surviving tracks give a sense of how the junction once worked.