During the industrialisation of the mid-19th century a new, more efficient system was needed to accelerate the transport of passengers and goods. Horse-drawn carts on the mostly poor roads were no longer sufficient. As a solution, the construction of a railway, as was being developed in England, was considered. However, the
Bavarian King, Ludwig I preferred the extension of canals. Construction of railways was left to private companies and associations. After the opening of the approximately
railway from Nuremberg to Fürth on 28 November 1835, interested citizens founded railway committees in Munich and
Augsburg. The two committees soon joined to facilitate the construction of a railway line from Augsburg to Munich. The two major cities would be connected by a faster service than could be provided by stagecoach over a distance that in 1835 was measured as 17
Poststunden (“post hours”, which were each half a
Bavarian mile, that is about ), equivalent to about . Based on the travel speed of a locomotive, a railway could be expected to reduce travel time to one-third of a stage coach's time. The railway committee commissioned a state official to plan the approximate route of the line. The state was to build the railway. The government turned down the proposal, but indicated that Bavaria would financially support its construction.
Joseph Anton von Maffei founded the
Munich–Augsburg Railway Company (
München-Augsburger Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft) as a private company on 23 July 1837. After further support from shareholders had been found, construction began in the spring of 1838.
The station in Marsfeld In 1838, the initial planning began for the station in Munich. The Planning Director of the
Munich–Augsburg railway, Ulrich Himbsel, and his deputy, Joseph Pertsch, proposed a railway layout with an entrance building and a warehouse for freight. Behind the entrance building, a semicircular building was followed by four radially arranged halls. This was based on English models. Joseph Pertsch preferred a location on today's
Sonnenstraße, while Ulrich Himbsel favoured a station at Spatzenstraße. This would have been at the location of the current station. The Munich-Augsburg railway company could not afford the building and the land on either site. A temporary wooden building was put into operation with the opening of the first section of the line from Munich to
Lochhausen on the Munich–Augsburg line on 1 September 1839. This station was built in
Marsfeld at the present site of
Hackerbrücke. It consisted of a simple wooden station building and two toll booths. In the entrance building there were two waiting rooms and several work spaces. Attached to this building there was a wide station hall with two tracks with a
turntable at the end of each. There was also a locomotive workshop in the station area. A year later, on 4 October 1840, the entire line to Augsburg was opened. The line was used by about 400 passengers daily. The wooden building was considered to be too small for a city like Munich and not very impressive. King Ludwig commissioned the architect
Friedrich von Gärtner to redesign the station in 1843. It would be closer to the city centre, as the old station was half an hour away from the city. When, in 1844, the Munich-Augsburg Railway Company was nationalised, the first steps for the realisation of a new station building were carried out. Three new plans were presented. The station under the first option would have been at the shooting range, under the second option it would have been on the Marsfeld plain, and under the third on Sonnenstraße. In the following years, the state and the city could not choose among the three proposals. On 4 April 1847, the station suffered a major fire, whose cause could not be determined. No one was injured but parts of the freight and operations facilities were destroyed. On 5 April 1847, the king of Bavaria decided to build the new station at the shooting range. The station at Marsfeld was to be restored in the autumn of 1847 to serve until the completion of the new station. Due to a delay in the construction, the tracks were extended to the buildings of the former shooting range. The building of the shooting range now served as an entrance building to the new station, which was opened on 15 November 1847. It was equipped with the latest technology, a central hot water heater and a mechanical clock with a central drive, with dials that were up to from the central mechanism. The station was illuminated from 1851 by coal gas. The new building proved again to be too small with the opening of the
railway to Landshut in 1858. This meant that the
Royal Bavarian Eastern Railway Company (
Königlich privilegirte Actiengesellschaft der bayerischen Ostbahnen) built a station north of the actual station. The new station, also called the
Ostbahnhof, consisted of a and platform hall with four tracks. This became a carriage house with three tracks, a goods shed and other outbuildings.
New construction in the 1880s , 1870 The opening of the
line from Munich to Ingolstadt in 1867, the
Munich–Mühldorf–Simbach and the
Munich–Grafing–Rosenheim lines in 1871 and the
Munich–Buchloe in 1873 created further capacity problems. The Munich Centralbahnhof precinct was divided into three station sections. The first section, which was also called the inner section, took over passenger, express freight, and small freight operations. The middle section at Arbeitersteg ("workers' bridge", now called Donnersberger Bridge) contained wagonload operations and the marshalling yard. The outer section ended at the Friedenheimer Bridge and included locomotive and carriage sheds and the central workshop. The station was long up to its last crossover and wide at its widest point. There were 226 sets of points, 42
turntables and of tracks. Other possibilities considered were a through station west of
Hackerbrücke (Hacker Bridge), on the site of the current
S-Bahn station, and connected to the
East station by a tunnel, transferring local traffic only to an underground station and moving the main station to the South Station. In a memorandum of September 1911, the Bavarian government discarded all these options in favour of an extension of the Starnberg wing station and the construction of Holzkirchen wing station (
Holzkirchner Bahnhof), partly serving the
line to Holzkirchen. Construction began in 1914, and continued through the First World War, but it was delayed. The wing stations finally opened on 30 April 1921. Local traffic was largely shifted to the wing stations. The station reached 36 tracks in its largest expansion since the Holzkirchen wing station included an additional ten tracks. The trains were controlled by nine electromechanical interlockings built from 1922 to 1929.
The Reichsbahn and Hitler’s reconstruction plans Between 1925 and 1927, six of the lines beginning in Munich were electrified so that all parts of the station except the Holzkirchen wing station received overhead lines. From 1933,
Adolf Hitler directed Hermann Alker to create new plans for rebuilding the station. A new station would be built between
Laim and
Pasing stations and the old railway tracks would be replaced by a boulevard from
Karlsplatz to the new station. In addition, a
U-Bahn was planned from the new station to the central city under the boulevard. Alkers presented his plans but his client was not satisfied, as the station building would not look impressive at the end of the wide boulevard. In 1938,
Hermann Giesler solved the problem by turning the station to a 45-degree angle to the road. He planned a huge domed building with a height of and a diameter of . The timetable of the summer 1939 showed the station had a total of 112 arrivals and departures by scheduled long-distance services each day. It was the eleventh busiest node of Deutsche Reichsbahn's long-distance network.
During and after the Second World War During World War II the station suffered heavy damage from Allied bombing, but train services resumed after each air raid.
Construction of centralised signalling and the S-Bahn trunk line Talent DMUs in April 1970 in the train shed The central signalling centre was brought into operation on 11 October 1964 at 4 AM. The new signal box controlled 295 sets of points and 446 signals and detected occupancy on 300 sections of track and seven automatic block sections. The Starnberg wing station was affected by the construction of the
S-Bahn trunk line from 1967 because the trunk line was built under it. The trunk line and the new underground station were taken into operation on 28 April 1972 in time for the
1972 Summer Olympics. During the Summer Olympics the station had a high volume of passengers. On 2 September 1972, there were, for example, 35,000 passengers, excluding S-Bahn operations.
Improving infrastructure (2005) The platforms were narrow, with a width of and were too low. After the elimination of the baggage platforms, new passenger platforms were built that are up to high and up to wide. In addition, the facilities of the platforms, such as benches, were renewed and some platforms were extended to be long. A baggage tunnel was put into operation under tracks 12 and 13. Since 2004, the entire area of the station has
video monitoring. The 70 cameras are controlled by the control center of DB Security in the station. Meanwhile, the split-flap displays have been replaced with more modern
liquid-crystal displays. The loudspeaker systems have also been modernised. ==Current==