Nuremberg's U2 Became the First Metro Line Converted to Driverless Operation

Did you know a German city took an ordinary crewed subway line that had carried passengers with drivers since 1984 and turned the whole route into a fully automatic, driverless metro without shutting service for the rebuild?

Sam Okonkwo, Robotaxi · Oct. 1, 2026 · 3-4 min

VAG

NUREMBERG - Did you know a German city took an ordinary crewed subway line that had carried passengers with drivers since 1984 and turned the whole route into a fully automatic, driverless metro without shutting service for the rebuild?

That line is U2 on the Nuremberg U-Bahn. Operator VAG and Siemens ran the RUBIN automation project (Realisierung einer automatisierten U-Bahn in Nürnberg). New line U3 opened on 14 June 2008 as Germany's first fully automatic U-Bahn, sharing a central trunk with still-crewed U2 trains. Railway Gazette International reported that the first driverless revenue services on U2 itself began on 28 September 2009, with four of eight trains then under automatic control and full automation planned for 2 January 2010.

VAG's own anniversary account confirms the sequence: U3 entered fully automatic service on 14 June 2008, and U2 was converted to full automatic operation across 2009 and 2010. City and railway records, and the English Wikipedia entry on U2 (Nuremberg U-Bahn), corroborated by contemporary Railway Gazette coverage, state that from 2 January 2010 every revenue train on U2 has been fully automated. That makes U2 widely cited as the first existing rapid-transit line converted from fully manual to fully automatic operation while passenger service continued, including a period of mixed crewed and driverless trains on the shared trunk with U3.

The curiosity is not that metros can run without a driver. Lille, Vancouver, and later Paris Line 14 already proved empty-cab transit. It is that Nuremberg showed a brownfield conversion could work on a busy German U-Bahn: keep the passengers, keep the shared tracks, phase out the cab, and finish the switch on a New Year timetable. Long before robotaxis sold empty front seats on city streets, Nuremberg's U2 was already running that way underground.

Sam Okonkwo, Robotaxi. Sam Okonkwo is a senior correspondent covering robotaxis, fleet ops, and paid driverless service. Previously reported transport tech for trade titles; based in Austin.