page_title: Montabaur station
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Montabaur station / History
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Bahnhof Montabaur mit ICE 3 English: ICE 3 at Montabaur
context_page_description: Montabaur station is a station at the 89.1 kilometre point of the Cologne-Frankfurt high-speed railway and on the Limburg–Siershahn railway in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The station, which is served by regional and long-distance passenger services and freight traffic, is on the outskirts of the town of Montabaur. It is aligned parallel with Autobahn 3, which runs immediately to the north.
  The construction costs amounted to €23.6 million.
context_section_description: The planning of a Cologne–Gross-Gerau high-speed railway in the 1970s envisaged a station at Montabaur on its right bank (east of the Rhine) route alternative. The four-track infrastructure would have, in addition to the two central through tracks, two external platform tracks connected by scissors crossovers (with four sets of points) at each end of the station. The proposed station was assessed as having "predominantly regional importance", which justified "only a limited number of train stops". 
  A report commissioned by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which took into account only the territory of Rhineland-Palatine, determined in the late 1980s that 400,000 inhabitants and 210,000 employees would live in a car within 30 minutes in 2000.
  The route of the new line in Rhineland-Palatinate was the subject of many years of debate and political compromise. First, in the mid-1988, then Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised a high-speed link to the federal capital to the then mayor of Bonn, Hans Daniels. The Department of Transport developed, on the basis of this promise, a route running through Vilich in the northeastern outskirts of Bonn. This route would have cost around half a billion Deutschmarks (DM) more than the planned (and later realised) route via Siegburg, but half a billion DM less than running through Bonn Central Station (Hauptbahnhof).
  Prior to a decision of the Rhine route in the Federal Cabinet, the then premier of Rhineland-Palatinate, Carl-Ludwig Wagner 1989 called for a so-called option S in an interview in July. This envisaged a right bank route taking a sharp curve from Dernbach through a tunnel and a bridge over the Rhine to Koblenz before taking another a sharp curve back over another Rhine crossing to a purely right bank route to Frankfurt. The estimated additional costs of this option were DM 1.3 to 2.8 billion (about €0.7 to 1.4 billion). The Federal Transport Minister, Friedrich Zimmermann spoke of a "provincial farce" and suggested, as a compromise, the establishment of a high-speed station in Limburg to provide a connection with Koblenz. In addition to the establishment of the station, the compromise proposal provided for a package of other railway infrastructure in Rhineland-Palatinate. The then Deutsche Bundesbahn initially accepted the route via Limburg and Vilich in order to prevent further delays to the project.
  After the completion of the route selection process, Federal Cabinet decided on 20 December 1989 that the line would be built on the current route of the high-speed line along the A3. It also agreed to a station at Limburg. A station in Montabaur was not explicitly mentioned.
  On 21 March 1990, an agreement on the planned new line between the premiers of Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse and the Federal Minister of Transport called for a site at Montabaur. A major reason for the proposal for this station was that by this time it had been decided that the three options considered for connecting to Limburg were not feasible and therefore there would be no direct connection to the Lahn Valley Railway, which would have provided a connection to both Koblenz and Gießen. The station that was built instead in Montabaur would have good accessibility to both these areas via a new autobahn interchange in Montabaur. 
  In the planning process, the possibility of an ICE stop was studied from 1991. In the spring of 1993, Heinz Dürr, the Chairman of Deutsche Bundesbahn, and Rainer Brüderle, the Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of Economics and Transport, agreed on the establishment of a station in Montabaur. Construction of the ICE railway station was confirmed at the completion of the planning process in 1995. Construction began in 1997.
  In 1993, Deutsch Bundesbahn signed a contract that provided that an ICE would stop in Montabaur every hour until 2007. The destination and origins of these services would be determined later. The state participated in the financing of the station and established the new autobahn interchange. The town of Montabaur also built an industrial park at the station, which was intend
caption: Montabaur station with non-stopping ICE 3
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