Kunowice railway station

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Kunowice
The Kunowice station building, built in 1965 in 2011, was then non-functional
The Kunowice station building, built in 1965 in 2011, was then non-functional
Data
Location in the network Connecting station
Platform tracks 2
IBNR 5100083
location
City / municipality Slubice
Place / district Kunowice
Voivodeship Lebus
Country Poland
Coordinates 52 ° 20 '31 "  N , 14 ° 38' 23"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 20 '31 "  N , 14 ° 38' 23"  E
Railway lines
List of train stations in Poland
i16 i16 i18

The Kunowice station , formerly known as Kunersdorf (Kr Weststernberg) , is a station in the village of Kunowice in the municipality of Słubice in western Poland . The station on the Frankfurt (Oder) –Poznań railway line, opened in 1870, was most important in the period from 1945 to the end of the 1990s, when it was the Polish border station on the border with the GDR and Germany . For this purpose, the station was given a representative, but now unused, reception building in the 1960s.

Location and name

The station is about one kilometer south of the center of Kunowice and about five kilometers east of the city center of Słubice and the German-Polish border on the Oder . The Frankfurt (Oder) –Poznań railway runs roughly in an east-west direction in the station area. In the route nomenclature of the Polish State Railways (PKP), the station is located at km 472.9 of route no. 3, Warsaw – state border. When it opened in 1870, the station was initially named Blankensee after a nearby body of water , and in 1898 it was given the addition Blankensee near Frankfurt (O) . Since 1902 it bears the name of the nearby village of Kunersdorf, initially in the form Kunersdorf (Kr West-Sternberg) , since 1910 Kunersdorf (Kr Weststernberg) and since 1940 Kunersdorf without a name extension. After the place and train station came to Poland in 1945, the station was called Kunowsko and has had its current name since 1947.

history

Infrastructure

Railway keeper's house from the time before the Second World War with remains of the lettering Kunersdorf (Kr West-Sternberg)
Entrance building from 1965

With the opening of the railway line from Frankfurt (Oder) to Poznan , Blankensee station was also the first stopover east of Frankfurt to go into operation. At first it only had local significance. This changed little when in 1907 the Weststernberger Kreiskleinbahn opened its line from Kunersdorf (Kr West-Sternberg), as the station was then called, to Ziebingen (today Cybinka ). The systems were built in such a way that the route from Kunersdorf to Frankfurter Dammvorstadt (today Słubice), east of the Oder, could be extended. However, these plans were not implemented. In the 1930s, branching off from the line to Ziebingen, a connecting railway to a Wehrmacht air base went into operation.

In the Potsdam Agreement in 1945, the Oder-Neisse line was defined as Poland's new western border with Germany, and from 1949 with the GDR. The route from Frankfurt via Kunowice into the interior of Poland became by far the most important connection between the GDR and Poland. The operational, passport and customs clearance tasks at the border were distributed across several stations. Kunowice became the Polish border control station for passenger traffic. On the Polish side, border clearance in freight traffic was handled in Rzepin station . On the GDR side, border clearance usually took place in the Frankfurt (Oder) train station (passenger traffic) and in the Oderbrücke train station (goods traffic).

With the increasing passenger traffic between the GDR and Poland or the Soviet Union, the tasks of the station also grew. Between 1963 and 1965 a new representative reception building was built, which was opened on February 5, 1965. In 1966 the already sparse passenger traffic on the branching line to Cybinka was stopped. Since 1964 there were plans to build a joint transfer station between the two railway administrations on the former airfield west of the station, but this was never realized.

In 1988 the line from the east was electrified with the Polish direct current system. A commemorative plaque was set up in the station for the 10,000th electrified route kilometer since the founding of the People's Republic of Poland. After German reunification, the first two pairs of Eurocity trains ran between Berlin and Warsaw in 1992 , which no longer stopped in Kunowice as scheduled. For the other long-distance trains, Kunowice initially remained a border station. In 1998 the long-distance train stops were thinned out and discontinued entirely in 1999. Until Poland joined the Schengen Agreement in 2006, border controls have taken place on both sides in Frankfurt, Rzepin or on the moving train. The Kunowice train station almost completely lost its importance.

After 2000, the line was expanded on the Polish side. The Kunowice railway systems were also significantly redesigned. The reception building lost its functions and stood empty for years. Since then, Kunowice has only been a stop, with a branch east of the platforms for the line to Cybinka. This only had sporadic freight traffic. On June 30, 2012 there was another special trip on the route; Announcements indicated that this should be the last train on the route to be converted into a bike path.

After 2013, the reception building was taken over by a forwarding company that renovated it and used it as the company headquarters.

passenger traffic

Local train from Frankfurt (Oder) on the platform in Kunowice

Blankensee / Kunersdorf was only served by passenger trains, express and express trains did not stop there. After 1945 Kunowice stopped all passenger trains from Berlin via Frankfurt to Poland and on to the Soviet Union. For decades there were direct connections from Kunowice not only to Berlin and Warsaw, but also to Moscow , Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Kiev , Paris and Hook of Holland . Long-distance trains stopped stopping in 1998/99. Since then, Kunowice has been used exclusively for regional traffic. This has always been sparse since 1945. Until the mid-1990s, Kunowice was only served by two pairs of trains a day from Rzepin and Poznań. In the public timetables, the train station was shown as the end point of the trains from the east, but some of them continued to Frankfurt for the railway workers' official traffic. Since the mid-1990s, trains have continued to run to Frankfurt for public transport, and the offer has been expanded to include a third pair of trains per day.

The traffic on the route to Ziebingen / Cybinka was always moderate. Before the Second World War, there were usually three pairs of trains a day. In the 1950s and 1960s, two pairs of trains drove a day, which took well over an hour for the 22-kilometer route.

Investments

View into the station building. To the left of the former ticket office is the former tunnel entrance
Platform on the line to Cybinka, with the main line in the background

The station building opened in 1965 on the north side of the tracks has a floor area of ​​576 square meters. It was erected on a ground that was lowered from the level of the track. The basement of the building can be reached from the station forecourt, to which a cul-de-sac leads from the village. The ticket offices were located there, and a tunnel led to the island platform on the two through tracks of the main line. The house platform only served the border authorities. The station building is no longer in use and was put up for sale by PKP in 2011. Some of the border clearance facilities were located in a somewhat older building further east that served as a reception building until 1965. This is used privately today.

Today's stop (Polish : przystanek ) Kunowice consists only of the two through tracks , each of which is located on an outside platform. The platforms can be reached via a road crossing in the western part of the station. A railway keeper's house from before 1945 on the northwest side of the crossing has been preserved. The central signal box of the station, which was built in the 1960s, stood on the southwest side of the level crossing. After the station renovation in the early 2000s, it was no longer needed and was subsequently torn down. To the south of the main tracks there were three more continuous tracks and a branch track. From there the route to Cybinka was served, and the facilities were also used for local freight traffic. With the exception of one track for traffic to Cybinka, the side tracks have been dismantled, individual parts of the building are still standing. A remains of the platform for the trains to Cybinka near the intersection with the road has been preserved. The line to Cybinka has been operational since the station renovation in a separate Kunowice podg facility . (the addition stands for posterunek odgałęźny , junction) east of the stop.

Słubice stop

Słubice stop

On the eastern bank of the Oder between Frankfurt and Kunersdorf, a non-public stopping point was created for the air base in 1938. In 1945 he came to Poland. In the first post-war years it was used for public transport and was named Słubice. The city of the same name includes the Frankfurt Dammvorstadt, which came to Poland in 1945, and the other parts of the former Frankfurt urban area lying to the right of the Oder. However, the breakpoint was far outside the residential areas and was closed to passenger traffic as early as 1950. Later there was an operating point for local freight traffic. In the course of the route reconstruction, a new stop was built in Słubice after 2000, which went into operation in 2003. Like the Kunowice stop, it has two outer platforms on the main line. For several years, only two pairs of trains stopped at both stations a day; when the timetable changed in December 2018, the offer was reduced to four pairs of trains a day.

Web links

Commons : Kunowice station  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Ryszard Stankiewicz, Marcin Stiasny: Atlas Linii Kolejowych Polski . Entry about Kunowice in the directory of stations, stops and operating points with current and former names . Eurosprinter, 2010, ISBN 978-83-926946-8-7 .
  2. Lothar Meyer, Horst Regling, Frankfurt (Oder) railway junction. transpress, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-613-71126-5 , p. 117.
  3. Lothar Meyer, Horst Regling, Frankfurt (Oder) railway junction. transpress, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-613-71126-5 , p. 115.
  4. PKP announcement of August 30, 2011  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed July 24, 2012@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.pkp-nieruchomosci.pl  
  5. Track plan, printed in: Bernd Kuhlmann: Railways over the Oder-Neisse border . Ritzau - Verlag Zeit und Eisenbahn, Pürgen 2004, ISBN 3-935101-06-6 , p. 115