Freiburg Hauptbahnhof
Freiburg Hauptbahnhof is the central railway station of the German city of Freiburg im Breisgau. The Rhine Valley Railway, Höllentalbahn and the Breisach Railway meet here.
The station is located on the western outskirts of the Old Town of Freiburg, about a kilometre from Freiburg Minster at 5–7 Bismarckallee. This street is also fronted by the Freiburg concert hall, several hotels and the Jazzhaus Freiburg jazz club and the Xpress office complex was built along the line in 2008.
The first station building was built in 1845 in the Rundbogenstil, with Romanesque Revival elements. A temporary station built after the destruction of the station in 1944/45 lasted 50 years. This was replaced around the turn of the 21st century with an ensemble of buildings, including the station hall, a shopping mall, hotels and office blocks. With around 38,300 passengers per day, in 2005 it was the fifth largest railway station in Baden-Württemberg.
It is a Category 2 station serving southern Baden-Württemberg.
History
Construction and inauguration of the 19th century
The construction of the Baden Mainline from Mannheim to Basel was approved at an extraordinary meeting of the Baden parliament in 1838. The first bill, presented by the Minister of State Georg Ludwig von Winter on 13 February 1838, contained no information about the places to be connected. This draft was referred to a commission, which presented its findings on 5 March. Deputy Karl Georg Hoffmann introduced a motion during the debate that provided, among other things, 500,000 South German gulden to avoid Freiburg being left off the route of the line. The final version of the "Act for the construction of a railway from Mannheim to the Swiss border near Basel", which was signed by the Baden Grand Duke Leopold at the end of March 1838, included a provision explicitly stating that the line would run through Freiburg.Although Freiburg was described as the main trading centre of upper Baden at the time, there was more political debate and more consideration of options by the railway planners than in relation to any other city of the Grand Duchy. There were two major challenges to the integration of Freiburg with the, originally single-track, line between Offenburg and Basel: The city of Freiburg is not only away from a relatively straight line between Mannheim and Basel, it is also higher than any other city on the Rhine Valley Railway north of Haltingen and in particular it was 308 Baden feet or higher than Kenzingen, which is located to the north. Alternative routes through the Rhine Valley that omitted Freiburg, running either from Riegel to Hartheim or from Kenzingen to Biengen near Bad Krozingen, would have been much shorter and would not have involved the gradients required to climb to the Freiburger Bucht at the foot of the Black Forest.
The commission's proposal for the construction of the line to begin in Mannheim, Freiburg and Isteiner Klotz had not come about. The commission wanted to wait to benefit from the experience of the construction of the line from Mannheim and found that this approach facilitated the work while also allowed a degree of flexibility in the operation of the line. According to the law of 1838 work should have started immediately, at least preliminary work, so "that the progress of the railway is stopped nowhere". After a proposal to build a passenger station at a site in Lehen in the area of the current A 5 autobahn was excluded as being located too far from Freiburg, it decided to build the line immediately west of the city through the "Vauban belt", the flat zone previously kept clear for firing cannon-shot from the fortifications designed by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. There was plenty of space for an extensive network of tracks. This solution, however, required a grade of 1:171, the largest grade on the Baden mainline. This required levelling of the route from Köndringen, continuing to the south to Schallstadt.
The railway reached Offenburg on 1 June 1844 and construction began on the section from Riegel to Freiburg in 1841. In 1843, the cornerstone was laid for the station in Freiburg; this ceremony involved the transportation of the locomotive, Der Rhein of the Maschinenbau-Gesellschaft Karlsruhe over the highway to Freiburg. On 22 July 1845, the first trial train to Freiburg ran with six carriages, hauled by the locomotive, Der Kaiserstuhl of Baden class IIIc. Another trial followed on 26 July with the locomotive Keppler, which hauled 700 passengers in 21 carriages to Freiburg.
On 30 July 1845 the station was opened in the presence of Grand Duke Leopold and his son Prince Frederick. Apart from politicians, such as the Baden Foreign Minister, Alexander von Dusch, the Minister for the Interior, Karl Friedrich Nebenius and Frederick Rettig, officials, mayors and officers of the town guards of the local towns travelled on a train hauled by the locomotive, Zähringen, with musical accompaniment by the guards regiment, which had already travelled over the line. When the train arrived in Freiburg at 12.40, Mayor Friedrich Wagner welcomed the guests at the still unfinished station building, while cannons on the Schlossberg fired a salute.
As early as August 1845, 1,474 passengers used the new express-line carriages to Freiburg and 1,682 passengers departed the city by train, which now operated five services per day. While the stagecoach service between Freiburg and Offenburg closed with the opening of the railway line, stagecoaches ran three times each day between Basel and Freiburg, each way. Franz Liszt is believed to have been one of the first famous passengers to use Freiburg station; he travelled on 16 October 1845 from Heidelberg to Freiburg in order to give a concert the next day. Freight operations also began in the summer of 1845.
With the completion of the section south to Schliengen in 1847, the temporary terminal station with two terminating tracks was converted into a through station with two continuing platform tracks, which were both required to deal with the increased volume of traffic. The rail link north to Rastatt and Karlsruhe played a decisive role in the Baden Revolution of 1848 and in its defeat in Breisgau by loyalists and Hessian troops and their heavy military equipment, which were quickly moved to Freiburg.
Extensions to the First World War
The "station at Freiburg" was initially outside the city, as shown in the plan by Joseph Wilhelm Lerch of 1852. It was initially accessible only via the extended Bertoldstraße, until the completion of the entrance building on Eisenbahnstraße in 1861. The construction of the railway station led to Freiburg finally growing out of the confines of the fortress. Hotels, restaurants and the central post office were built in the Vauban belt along Eisenbahnstraße and a landscaped area was established between the city and the station. The city of Freiburg implemented a zoning plan called Hinterm Bahnhof, leading to the development of the current Stühlinger quarter. Commercial operations and factories were soon established there, some of which were displaced from the now residential areas of Herder and Wiehre.During the 1870s, the Baden Railway expanded the station with waiting rooms, utility rooms and a courtyard. As a result of the annexation of Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Alsace-Lorraine was quickly connected to the rail network by the Freiburg–Colmar railway, which made a third platform track and second platform necessary. The Elz Valley Railway branching from the Rhine Valley Railway in Denzlingen opened to Waldkirch in 1875 and was extended to Elzach in 1901.
In 1885, rail transport in Freiburg had increased so much that the old station hall was demolished and two new halls were built. The level crossing was replaced by a bridge, then called the Kaiser Wilhelm bridge and now called Wiwilí bridge, after Freiburg's sister city in Nicaragua. Two underpasses were created during the renovation of 1885/86; these still exist today and lead to stairs connecting to each platform.
The station was named Hauptbahnhof following the opening of the Hell Valley Railway and Freiburg Wiehre station in 1887.
Freight warehouses and loading areas in the station hardly increased in the late 19th century despite an increase of about 20 percent of traffic since 1878. Therefore, between 1901 and 1905, a separate freight yard and an freight bypass line was built between Gundelfingen and Leutersberg for the relief of the main line.
Growth during the Weimar Republic
The station facilities for handling passengers were often criticised from the beginning of the 20th century. Complaints were made about the lack of platform tracks, which meant that arriving and waiting trains often had to share one of the three tracks. This could be a source of danger, as was shown, for example, in 1924, when a departing suburban train ran into another train that had run early and was waiting in the station. Also, the station was the target of criticism and the Freiburger Zeitung newspaper called it a "mousetrap". The passenger volume also increased massively in parallel with the population growth of Freiburg. Ticket sales in 1919 had almost doubled from the 1,340,954 tickets sold in 1900.Therefore, in 1910 there were plans for a complete rebuild of the station. The initial plans called for an entrance hall crowned by a dome and with a natural stone frontage, which would have been wide and deep. However, with planning almost complete, construction was delayed "until further notice" by the outbreak of the First World War. The necessary preparatory work for the new construction, the complete separation of passenger and luggage movements, was still completed.
It took until 1929 to establish an operations and locomotive depot between the Dreisam river and Basler Straße. This made it possible to create space for additional tracks and platforms since the locomotive sheds and workshops that had been located west of the station could now be moved to the new depot, which is now on the site of the DB Regio workshop in Freiburg. The space created was used for the construction of two more platforms in 1929 and 1938. The first of the two new platforms had a width of and a length of. The drain on the roof was initially installed in the centre and was no longer on the roof's slope. A postal lift was also installed with the construction of one of the new platforms.
Basler Straße was relocated in the course of the work by to the side and lowered by about. This enabled the two tracks of the main line, a headshunt and the two separate tracks of the Höllentalbahn, which had been opened on 8 November 1934, to cross over the street on three new bridges. The most dangerous level crossings within the city had now been eliminated. Crossings removed earlier included those at Albertstraße, Lehener Straße and on the Höllentalbahn.
Despite the cramped conditions, luxury trains already passed through the station at this time: in the summer of 1901, the Amsterdam–Engadin Express began operating. It was not, however, destined for a long life. Much more successful was the launch of the Rheingold on 15 May 1928, which served the station until the beginning of the war on 1 September 1939, when it had recently run over the Gotthard as far as Naples. On 15 May 1939, the Reichsbahn began running high-speed railcars via Freiburg on the Basel–Dortmund route and Basel–Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof ; these were both discontinued at the outbreak of war.