Hannover Hauptbahnhof (German for Hanover central station) is the main railway station for the city of Hanover in Lower Saxony, Germany. The railway junction is one of the 21 stations listed as a railway Category 1 station by DB Station&Service. It is also the most important public transport hub of the region of Hanover and it is served regional and S-Bahn services. The station has six platforms with twelve platform tracks, and two through tracks without platforms. Every day it is used by 250,000 passengers and 622 trains stop at the platforms (as of October 2012). About 2,000 people work here.
History
The first station on the current site, a temporary building that served the line to Lehrte, was erected in 1843. Instead of building a monumental terminus, a through station was built along with the line, making it the first through station in a major German city.
The first central station (Central-Bahnhof) was built from 1845 to 1847. Its architect is not certain, but it is sure that the far-sighted city architect August Heinrich Andrae was involved in selecting its specific location and that the Hanoverian court architect Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves and Ferdinand Schwarz contributed to it. It was built in a romantic-neoclassical style as a strictly symmetrical building. The massive masonry was covered in yellow plaster. Laves planned a new district, the Ernst-August-Stadt, for the area between Georgstraße and the railway. Roads led from several directions and converged on the station forecourt, the Ernst-August-Platz.
A wooden platform area was built next to the entrance building and on each side of the two tracks. That was enough for the first traffic because the still short trains running to the east and the west stopped at the same platform. There were no through trains initially. The first through train ran from 1 May 1851 between Berlin and Cologne. The first railway workshop was built opposite the station building. In 1853, the opening of the first section of the Southern Railway to Alfeld, Göttingen and Kassel made the through station into a railway junction. A marshalling yard was established in Hainholz to relieve the station in 1868.
The increasingly dense traffic on the railway created a problem since the railway line cut through the city. It was decided in 1873 to raise the railway line through the urban area by a height of . The old station building was demolished in 1875. The route built between 1875 and 1879 became the model for the Berlin Stadtbahn and similar projects in other German cities. In 1876, a yard for general freight was established at Weidendamm.
Second Station of 1879
As the first station was built at street level and therefore hindered the expansion of the city, of railway track were laid for a new rail network that was grade-separated from the street system. In addition, the new station had a long system of tracks. After preparatory work in 1873 to relocate the workshops to Leinhausen and the marshalling yards to Hainholz and the construction of freight diversion routes, construction of the core network, which still exists, began in 1875. The new station building was designed by Hubert Stier in the Renaissance Revival style. It was again a symmetrical building with a main hall and two wings, each of which was completed by a corner building. The eastern corner building with its (literally 'Emperor's room') had a separate driveway. The building was designed in yellow brick with red brick stripes and a sandstone base. The four platforms with seven platform tracks and two through tracks were spanned by two halls with a span. After the demolition of the nearly 30-year-old station building, the construction of the new station began in April 1877. It was opened on 22 June 1879 after 26 months of construction. Access to the platforms was via three tunnels and there were two more tunnels for the transport of luggage and for postal traffic. The system of tracks finished in 1883 comprised seven platform tracks and two central through tracks for freight trains. The train sheds consisted of two separate halls, each wide and long with a wide space between them for the two through tracks. The construction cost 12.7 million marks for the buildings and 22.5 million marks for the entire station precinct.