On its course of about 116 kilometers (72 mi), the Wupper passes through the city of Wuppertal where the suspension railway runs for 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) above the river.
It is crossed by the highest railway bridge in Germany near Müngsten, between Remscheid and Solingen. A few kilometers further down, Burg Castle is located on a hill overlooking the river.
Hydropower
From the 15th century, the Wupper and its numerous streams gave birth to hundreds of workshops, mills and factories on their banks. Originally water was used for dying, bleaching and washing canvas and cloth,[4] later it was used to power machines or transport waste.
The Wupper thus facilitated the early industrial expansion of Wuppertal (German for "Wupper Valley") during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. The Wupper Valley was one of world's first industrialized regions and empowered inter alia the Ruhrgebiet as a coal-mining region.
On July 21, 1950, a young elephant named Tuffi, made to ride on the train by her handler as an advertising stunt, decided she did not like the ride, panicked (and panicked the other, human, passengers), burst out of the car she was riding in, and jumped or fell into the Wupper, only slightly injuring herself. In 1970 Marguerita Eckel and Ernst-Andreas Ziegler published a children's picture book about the incident, Tuffi und die Schwebebahn.
The Wupper is cited in the German sayings: "Über die Wupper gehen", literally "To go over the Wupper", metaphorically meaning "going bankrupt", "going into jail" or "going to die".[5]
