Hamburg Central Station

About this place

Hamburg's central station is the busiest railway station in Germany and the second busiest in Europe, with around half a million passengers a day. But what makes it worth looking at is not the numbers — it is the roof: a single steel and glass vault seventy-three metres wide covering all the platforms with no intermediate columns. It was completed in 1906, and that span was a bold engineering achievement at the time — the decision to cover the platforms in one bay rather than with rows of columns was expensive and difficult, but it produced an open interior unlike the stations of its era. Stand on the upper bridge and you see the trains below and the glazed vault above in a single view. The building survived the 1943 bombing with limited damage and is among the few large structures of its period still standing in the city centre. Practically it is also where everything starts: city, regional and long-distance trains, and steps from the Monckebergstrasse shopping street and the Alster lake.