Is the tram system only in East Berlin?

You're right that the tram network is much older than 1950. Berlin had one of the densest tram systems in the world by the early 1900s, with lines crisscrossing both halves of the city. After the war, West Berlin made a deliberate shift away from trams, removing most tracks by the late 1960s in favor of buses and the expanding U-Bahn, partly because trams were seen as old-fashioned and blocking car traffic. East Berlin kept the trams running because they were reliable and didn't rely on imported fuel, plus the GDR government couldn't afford to rip them out and replace everything. You can still see remnants of the old West Berlin network if you look closely, like the tracks embedded in the street on Zossener Strasse in Kreuzberg.

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One bit of history worth mentioning: the tram was actually dismantled in West Berlin partly because of the car lobby and the Senate's vision of an "autogerechte Stadt" (a city built for cars). The U-Bahn was seen as the proper modern backbone, with buses filling in the gaps. The last West Berlin tram line ran from Zehlendorf to Dahlem and shut down in 1967. If you walk around Steglitz or Neukölln now, you can still spot sections of old track peeking through the asphalt on side streets.

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The tram system actually predates the division by quite a bit. Berlin had one of the earliest electric tram networks in the world, starting in the 1880s, and by the 1920s it covered most of the city. What you're seeing now is the result of a deliberate policy shift in the West after the war. The Senate decided trams were old-fashioned and blocked traffic, so they ripped out about 300 kilometers of track between the 1950s and 1960s, replacing them with buses and expanding the U-Bahn. The East kept theirs because it was practical and cheap, and they even added new lines to connect the big housing estates like Marzahn and Hellersdorf in the 1970s and 80s.

If you want to see a remnant of the old network, walk down Potsdamer Straße in Schöneberg. You can still spot the ghost tracks embedded in the asphalt near the intersection with Bülowstraße. They were never fully removed, just paved over.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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