Hamburg Central Station is the busiest railway station in Germany: 550,000 travelers pass through the Wandelhalle and over the platforms every day. And it's bursting at the seams, especially on Friday night. The station is considered as "overloaded railway" and according to ex-rail chief Rüdiger pit as "the biggest bottleneck" of the Deutsche Bahn.
For a long time, a conversion is planned, by 2030, an extension should be finished. Now the railway has presented new plans with a 25-page feasibility study, as the NDR reports. The designs were first publicly shown on Thursday evening in the Transport Committee of the Citizenship. "I think this is a project that will enable us to make the main station fit for the next 100 years," said Oliver Hasenkamp, head of Bahn project development, Sender.
The conversion would change the face of the monumental station, which was built as early as 1906, especially to the south: There is a 70 -meter-long extension of the listed building hall whose glass roof is to span even the adjacent street Steintordammbrücke. According to NDR, the rail passengers should be able to change to the city buses and escalators to the platforms.
The DB subsidiary, DB Station and Service, has prepared the plans in cooperation with the Hamburg Transport and Urban Development Authority. She also pleads for the construction of a skyscraper and glass covered market halls on Hachmannplatz in the east of the station. For the city conservation reasons speak against it, since it would have demolished stems. A glass cube in the north will serve as a bicycle parking space.
"The images shown in the Transport Committee are neither a promise nor a program," said the spokesman for the Hamburg Transport and Economic Authority, Christian Füldner, the "Hamburger Abendblatt". "They are the result of the feasibility study and are not part of an architecturally revised plan."
The study is part of a design competition that the railway and the city of Hamburg want to advertise for the station, reports NDR. Afterwards an international competition takes place for the design, whose financing is not yet clarified.