In 1839, the
Leipzig–Dresden Railway Company (
Leipzig-Dresdner Eisenbahn-Compagnie) opened the first long-distance railway in Germany from Leipzig to its Dresden terminus, the
Leipziger Bahnhof. In the following decades more railways were built, increasing the destinations that could be reached from Dresden. Each private company built its own station as the terminus of its lines. The
Silesian Station (
Schlesischer Bahnhof) was opened in 1847 as the terminus of the
Görlitz–Dresden railway and the Bohemian station (
Böhmische Bahnhof) was opened in 1848 on the line towards
Bohemia. Seven years later, the
Albert station (
Albertbahnhof) was opened on the
line towards Chemnitz and the
Berliner station (
Berliner Bahnhof) opened in 1875 on the
line to Berlin. Between 1800 and 1900, the population of Dresden grew from 61,794 to 396,146. As a result, traffic grew enormously. The existing railway facilities proved to be inadequate to satisfy the increasing traffic as a result of rising mobility, population increase and industrialisation. In particular, the railway tracks of the poorly interconnected stations were not designed for through traffic and the many level crossings created major traffic problems. After the late 1880s, when all the railway infrastructure affecting the city had been nationalised, the Saxon government decided to carry out a fundamental reconstruction of the Dresden railway node under the leadership of the engineer Otto Klette. This would create a new central railway station, but there was no consensus on its location for a long time. After the Elbe flood of March 1845, the inspector of surveys, Karl Pressler suggested that the
Weißeritz near Cotta should be relocated and that the existing riverbed could be used for a central station. This plan was taken up and the former riverbed was used for a connection line between Dresden's long-distance railway stations, but, instead of a central station, the planners foresaw a new main station in front of the former Bohemian station, as it was already the busiest station in Dresden and it was close to Prager Straße, which became the most important shopping street of Dresden in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Böhmischer Bahnhof On 1 August 1848, the
Saxon-Bohemian State Railway (
Sächsisch-Böhmische Staatseisenbahn) opened the Bohemian station as the terminus of its line, which only extended to
Pirna. Four long wings, which were designed by Karl Moritz Haenel and Carl Adolph Canzler in the form of Italian Renaissance buildings, were annexed.The main platform could handle two trains simultaneous at first, but it was only long. An additional -long island platform was built between 1871 and 1872. This extension had become necessary because in 1869 the Bohemian station took over the passenger traffic of the Dresden–Werdau railway from the Albert Station, which was located about to the northwest and subsequently only served coal traffic. In order to handle the traffic towards Chemnitz a new main station (
Hauptbahnhof) was built in front of the Bohemian station. In addition, the new Hauptbahnhof would handle the passenger traffic of the Berliner station, which was also located in the Old Town (
Altstädt) on the south side of the Elbe, but almost to the northwest.
Construction and opening The basic functional design of the station with the combination of a large terminal hall at a low level and two flanking through halls at a high level is considered to be the work of Claus Koepcke, a ministry of finance official, and Otto Klette. This functional framework was based on an architectural competition held in 1892 for the design of the new station. Dresden architects
Ernst Giese and
Paul Weidner and Leipzig architect
Arwed Roßbach each won a first prize. The realised design incorporates elements of both drafts. Construction began in the same year, led by Ernst Giese and Paul Weidner. Railway operations continued at the Bohemian station while the south hall was opened to traffic on 18 June 1895. Subsequently, the Bohemian station was demolished and the construction of the central and northern halls started on its site. Until the completion of the entire building, the south hall served as the provisional station. The cost of construction amounted to 18 million
marks; corresponding to the equivalent of about €320 million. After more than five years of construction the whole building went into operation on 16 April 1898. At 2:08 AM the first train running as the
101 from Leipzig entered the newly opened Dresden Hauptbahnhof. Since the rapid increase in traffic could barely be handled, the first expansion of facilities was planned prior to the start of the First World War. In 1914, the Saxon Parliament approved funds for the expansion, but the beginning of the war prevented its realisation. The extension could not be started until the late 1920s. One obstacle to operations until then was that it was difficult to reach the terminal tracks in the eastern precinct. As a remedy, a new through track was built through the north hall between platforms 10 and 11, replacing a luggage platform. This would henceforth be used for the passage of additional trains to the eastern precinct and for the passage of unattached locomotives and freight traffic. To take advantage of the sharp rise in through passenger traffic, the covered side hall next to the south hall was demolished, so that the two freight train tracks could be moved on to an outer track on a new concrete structure over the pavement and the released space could be used for an island platform. During the Second World War, the station had only minor importance for the dispatch of troop and prisoner transports, though Dresden was a garrison town. However, it connected the Saxon railway network with
Bohemia and formed a bottleneck as a result. At the beginning of the war, Dresden hardly seemed threatened by air raids, so initially insufficient preparations were made and later additional preparations were no longer possible. The air raid shelters of the central station could accommodate about 2,000 people, but they lacked airlocks and ventilation systems. This had serious consequences: during the
great air raid on the night of 13 and 14 February 1945 the station burned down, and the entrance to the luggage store was set alight; as a result 100 people were burned to death and another 500 people suffocated in the air raid shelters. Subsequent air raids destroyed the railway tracks entirely. The station was made permanently inoperable during the eighth and final air raids on the city on 17 April 1945 by 580
USAAF bombers.
The long reconstruction In spite of its severe war damage the station was one of the distinctive buildings in the central Dresden. The restoration of rail connections had to take precedence over the restoration of the historic building. So passenger services were restored to
Bad Schandau by 17 May 1945. A temporary reconstruction began after the war and was completed in the same year. Some parts of the building, such as the concourses and the dome, were not immediately repaired and continued to deteriorate. At the same time a far-reaching reorganisation of the railway infrastructure was considered as the large-scale destruction of the city seemed to make it possible. Draft plans from 1946 show a turning loop south of the station, which would have allowed east–west traffic on the Chemnitz–Görlitz route to stop without a change of locomotives. In 1946 and 1947, several drafts of a new, generously dimensioned central station replacing the Wettiner Straße station emerged. The former Hauptbahnhof would have been renamed
Bahnhof Dresden Prager Straße and passenger services would have operated only through the north hall and from the east side. Initially a postal station was planned for the remaining area. This was abandoned in the draft of 1947; the south hall would now also be used for passenger operations, while the central hall would be used for any purpose. It is not absolutely certain why these plans ultimately did not proceed. Possible reasons were financial problems, material shortages, labour shortages and general planning uncertainty during a period of social and political changes. A planned new entrance building on Wiener Platz with an attached new administration building for the Reichsbahndirektion
Railway division of Dresden was also not realised. The remaining structure was restored from 1950 in a similar but simpler form, due to economic difficulties and the shortage of skilled workers. The roof, which had previously been partially covered with glass, was temporarily covered with wood, board and slate. The station building itself was only partially restored. In particular, the buildings south of the main hall remained hollow ruins, although the outer walls implied a complete reconstruction. The intact steel construction of the dome over the main hall was also externally covered with wood and slate and a
coffered ceiling was built inside it. The construction work was not largely completed until the early 1960s. One of the last measures was the modification of the clock towers on either side of the entrance portal to fit the “skeletal” facade. In the coming decades, the station's makeshift parking and traffic arrangements and its power lines shaped perceptions of it.
East German times hauled by
DR class SVT 18.16 leaving the south hall (1972) From the 1960s the station again became an important hub for long-distance services from Western Europe and Scandinavia to Southeastern Europe. The well-known services of this period were the
Vindobona (
Berlin–
Vienna), the Hungaria (Berlin–
Budapest) and the Meridian (
Malmö–
Bar). As part of the change in traction, trains hauled by
electric locomotives reached Dresden from
Freiberg for the first time in September 1966. A good ten years later–on 24 September 1977–the final steam-hauled service departed the station towards Berlin as the Dresden Express. In the following days, peaceful demonstrations took place in Lenin-Platz and the adjacent Prager Straße, resulting in the beginning of a dialogue on state power at the local level with the establishment of the Group of 20 (
Gruppe der 20) on the evening 8 October. With a combined 156 arrivals and departures of scheduled long-distance trains per day in the station in the summer 1989 timetable, it was the third most important node in the network of
Deutsche Reichsbahn, after Berlin and Leipzig.
After the political changes in the GDR in cross-border traffic Since the 1990s, Dresden has gradually become part of the
Intercity network. From 1991, individual Intercity services ran via Leipzig and the
Thuringian Railway to
Frankfurt am Main and these service have run every two hours since 1992. The first pair of
EuroCity services ran from Dresden to
Paris-Est over the same route on 2 June 1991. That same year,
InterRegio trains served Dresden for the first time. The 2048/2049 and 2044/2143 trains pairs ran between Cologne and Dresden. Until the timetable change on 28 May 2000, a pair of trains ICE ran daily via Berlin to Dresden, then the hourly ICE line 50 service, which has continued to the present, was introduced from Dresden to Frankfurt via Leipzig, eliminating the connection via Berlin. Dresden station became the starting point of the central east–west connection in the German ICE network. This change caused changes in locomotive-hauled long-distance operations, since Dresden was now served almost exclusively in the north–south direction by Intercity (IC) and EuroCity (EC) trains. There were other related changes to the IC/EC network. So already the service, subsequently numbered EC/IC 27 (Prague–Dresden–Berlin), received a through connection to Hamburg in 1994 and in 2003 two pairs of trains continued to Vienna and a pair of trains continued to
Aarhus in Denmark for the first time.
ICE TD (class 605) services ran on the Saxon-Franconian trunk line to Nuremberg from 10 June 2001. These replaced
InterRegio services that had been abandoned a year earlier. After the
2002 Elbe flood and the resulting disruption of the line between Chemnitz and Dresden, as well as problems with the
tilting systems, Deutsche Bahn discontinued the operation of the trainsets from the summer of 2003. Instead services were operated with Intercity trains until the end of long-distance services in 2006. A
suitcase bomb was discovered in the station by an explosive-detection dog on 6 June 2003. After the evacuation of the entire building, the police destroyed the suitcase bomb. The bomb consisted of a standard wheeled suitcase which contained an alarm clock, a pressure cooker, explosives and stones as well as an ignition device with fuse. According to experts, this bomb was capable of exploding.
The fundamental renovation after 2000 The first restoration work took place in the 1990s. The bridges over
federal highway 170 were renovated and the eastern building was given a new facade on the street side and new entrance steps. A draft plan by
Gerkan, Marg and Partners for the modernisation of the station in the mid-1990s envisaged part of the central hall remodelled as a market as well as the building of an office and hotel tower. This design was not realised. At the end of December 2000, the Board of Deutsche Bahn, let a contract for modernisation work. The planned construction costs amounted to approximately
DM 100 million, which was funded from the federal government's remediation funds, Deutsche Bahn's own funds and a grant from the state of Saxony (DM 13 million). The completion of construction works was scheduled for the spring of 2003. The extensive redevelopment had already commenced in 2000 with the commissioning of the Leipzig remote
electronic control centre. The additional redevelopment included the renovation of the entrance building and the train shed roof, track work of the north and south hall and changes to the track and signaling systems. To ensure uninterrupted movement of trains, the track structures of the north hall were first rehabilitated and recommissioned in November 2003. Subsequently, the renovation of the track structures of the south hall began at the end of 2004. The train shed roof was renovated from 2002 and the station building was renovated from the end of 2003. Because of the construction, shops were accommodated in containers in the station hall from 2002 to 2006. The dome above the connection hall between the two halls, which is up to high, the connecting hall and the large waiting rooms were restored to their historical designs. A travel centre and a supermarket were opened in the waiting rooms in July 2006, simultaneously with the commissioning of the central hall. The high-level platforms are now reached via escalators and lifts. The 2002 floods delayed the renovation work significantly. On 12 August 2002, the station was closed due to flooding by the
Weißeritz, which had returned to its old route through Dresden and followed the route of the line to Chemnitz to reach the Hauptbahnhof, reaching a height of up to at the station. Water, mud and debris caused damage of €42 million. Many sections of track were impassable for a long time, especially towards Chemnitz. After a few regional trains reached the station on 2 September 2002, a long-distance train also reached it. It was carried out in 2006 to coincide with the celebration of the 800-year anniversary of the city. The opening meant the end of a significant obstacle for tourism, but the renovations had not yet finished even in 2014. In December 2007, the newly designed network of tracks was put into operation on the station's south side, except for platform 1, which was opened at the end of 2008. In addition, the two freight train tracks outside the south hall were rebuilt, but omitting the platform between the tracks that had been built with the tracks in about 1930. After 20 months of construction, carried out as part of the federal economic stimulus package, the refurbishment of the station's energy systems were completed in June 2011. This construction work included the renovation of the royal pavilion. Since the summer of 2011, Deutsche Bahn has been developing a future retail space under the tracks of the north and south hall of the station. Around €25 million were expected to be invested by 2014. It has around 40 storefronts with a total area of . The first new stores opened in August 2013, although construction work had not been completed in April 2014. However, this construction phase was not included in the 2011–2015 federal Investment Framework Plan (
Investitionsrahmenplan) and construction is not currently scheduled (as of 2012). In September 2013, Deutsche Bahn said that the platforms of the central hall would be replaced by 2019 and they would also be slightly raised. The
Förderverein Dresdner Hauptbahnhof e. V. (Friends of Dresden Hauptbahnhof) supported the renovation and enabled the recovery of some details about the required conservation measures. So broken decorative elements on a sandstone facade of the
clock tower were returned to their correct places, windows were equipped with arches and
architraves and the crowning group statue of
Saxonia with personifications of science and technology have been restored. == Building==