page_title: Hannover Hauptbahnhof
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Hannover Hauptbahnhof / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The central station in Hanover in the year 1850. Deutsch: Der Hauptbahnhof Hannover um 1850. Stahlstich von E. Höfer nach einer Vorlage von J. F. Lange. Français&#160;: La gare centrale de Hanovre vers 1850, gravure sur acier par E. Höfer d'après un modèle de J. F. Lange.
context_page_description: Hannover Hauptbahnhof 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. About 2,000 people work here.
context_section_description: 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 4.5 m (15 ft). 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.
caption: Central station in about 1850 (steel engraving)
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