Almost like the chapel of a medieval royal palace, the extension of the magnificent neo-Romanesque building rises into the foreground of the photo: the round portal flanked by powerful sandstone columns is richly decorated under a pointed gable, a wide staircase leads up to it.

The roof of the building on the photo, which is probably around 100 years old, points at a steep angle into the sky, picking up on the polygonal floor plan with its faceted surfaces.

Today's viewer is fascinated by the fact that the function of the building cannot be immediately deduced from the image alone.

It is the princely building of Worms main station, which opened in 1904, and is adjoined to the right by the reception building of what was then the Grand Ducal Hessian railway junction on the Rhine.

No sign of locomotives, wagons or rails.

Instead, the historic postcard presents the station as a representative inner-city building in front of which strollers and schoolchildren meet.

Motifs like this make it clear that train stations are not just places of transit and interfaces between different forms of transport – including pedestrians – but that they can also serve as places of urban identification and business cards.

Accordingly, there were many of these urban vedutas as postcards for mailing, staging train stations while ignoring the technical infrastructure.

Greetings from the spa town

Jörg Koch chose the Worms commemorative picture as one of the first motifs in his book "German Railway Stations in Historical Views" (Transpress, 192 pages with around 200 illustrations, 29.90 euros).

The multifaceted view of train stations from the mobility cathedrals of the metropolises to architecturally interesting buildings along branch lines shows that the postcard from Worms is no exception in contemporary visual language.

This is also shown by comparing the motif with views of two other station buildings, which were also designed by the architect Fritz Klingholz.

Klingholz, who was born in what is now Wuppertal in 1861 and died in Berlin in 1921, designed the neo-baroque main station, which opened in 1906, for the former Nassau residence (Prussian since 1866) and today's Hessian state capital Wiesbaden.

This is also presented on historical postcards with the large clock tower and the facade of the entrance building facing the city center - depending on the photographer's location, either with a fountain or with a fenced-in green area in the foreground.

Here, too, there is no direct reference to the hustle and bustle of rail traffic in the large terminal station, which once had eleven platforms and now has ten.

Whether the recipients of such postcard-sized greetings from the spa town ever wondered whether a train station without a train is still one?

That may sound like a philosophical gimmick.

But in Wiesbaden, in 2021, this discourse had to be faced in a very practical way and in everyday life for months.

After the motorway bridge over the Salzbachtal, which was in danger of collapsing, was closed, the most important railway lines to Wiesbaden were also interrupted.

Only the so-called Ländchesbahn, coming from Niedernhausen, still drove to the main station.