Fürstenbahnhof
Fürstenbahnhof or - in an existing reception building - the Fürstenzimmer are separate reception systems of a railway , which are used by high-ranking personalities for waiting and staying as well as for receiving and saying goodbye to guests. Today they are only used as such in very rare cases.
occasion
In the highly corporatist stratified society of the 19th century, where in Europe the railway network was built for the most part, the transport of passengers was subjected by train to all dominant class barriers: The railway cars were in three or four car classes divided, particularly rich or Privileged people, especially the heads of the ruling houses, also had saloon cars or even their own court trains . This class separation existed analogously in the reception buildings : There were waiting rooms for the different classes. Fürstenbahnhof and Fürstenzimmer fulfilled this function for this group of people as waiting, changing and boarding options for the “highest and highest rulers” - as it was formulated at the time. They were the stationary equivalent of saloon cars and court trains.
In 19th century Germany, the states and their heads were numerous. The royal train stations and princely rooms were equally widespread: They can be found at railway junctions and in royal cities , often also in rural train stations, when high nobility resided nearby , the sovereign maintained a hunting lodge or a military training area was located. Almost all of the metropolitan train stations and train stations in major health resorts built between around 1860 and 1918 had appropriate premises. In 1895 the Prussian State Railways recorded 116 such systems, in 1918 there were 153 and in all of Germany more than 300. In addition, buildings were temporarily erected - depending on the occasion - that served as a royal train station when high visitors were expected and such a facility was not on site duration. The occasion could be an initiation or a maneuver . The costs for this were quite substantial. When Kaiser Wilhelm II inaugurated the Dortmund-Ems Canal on August 11, 1899 , Dortmund Central Station and Rauxel Station were provided with temporary reception systems for 10,000 marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 69,000 euros). In 1907, two additional reception tents, which could be set up and dismantled again, were procured for Kaiser Wilhelm II, the “travel emperor”, which were kept ready in Posen and Hanover after the tent that his grandfather had procured for this purpose in 1883 and held by the Frankfurt Railway Directorate , no longer met the demand. The costs for the royal train stations and rooms that were otherwise kept in reserve were high, measured against the low actual use.
With the fall of the monarchies in Germany , Austria-Hungary and Russia at the end of the First World War and the associated loss of importance for the aristocracy, the royal train stations in these countries became inoperable, stood empty, were used for other purposes or demolished.
In Great Britain such facilities existed at the railway stations closest to the royal residences, but the nobility and many rich industrialists also had facilities here. In Great Britain, there was also the fact that the competing private railway companies each had their own facilities of this type at the same location.
Designs
Since the facility was used to create the distance between the prince and his subjects required by the protocol , it consisted at least of a separate waiting room, usually had a separate road access and usually a driveway, often with a canopy. On the track side, she had to ensure that the prince had direct access to the platform and was able to enter his saloon car or the special train as quickly as possible. Apart from a few systems from the early days of the railway, where attempts were made to accommodate the prince's room in a central location in the reception building, which, however, turned out to be extremely impractical, this required a peripheral location to the reception systems for public transport. At terminal stations in Germany, the rooms were typically located in one of the side wings opposite platform 1, which had to be approached for protocol reasons. Larger facilities had separate rooms for the prince and princess, the respective servants, and rooms for the entourage.
There were basically four different designs:
- own train station. Example: The Vatican City train station
- own entrance building in a train station otherwise used by public transport. Example: Kaiserbahnhof in Potsdam or the imperial court pavilion Hietzing near Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna
- Extension to a station building, which was also used for public transport. Example: Darmstadt Hauptbahnhof
- Corresponding rooms in a reception building ("Prince's Room"), which was also used for public transport.
A chronological sequence is seen in these building types. On closer inspection it can be seen that it is more likely to be an expression of the economic power of the class rank of those for whom such a system was built, or the adaptation to the operational conditions of the railway.
See also
literature
- Peter Bock, Alfred Gottwaldt : Government trains, saloon cars, imperial train stations and state trips . Frankfurt 2010. ISBN 978-3-7973-1223-5
- Alfred Gottwaldt: Princely rooms in German train stations . In: Ders .: Der Hofzug sr. Majesty of the German Emperor, King of Prussia . Modellisenbahner Verlag. [O. J., approx. 1992]
- Railway in Hessen. Cultural monuments in Hessen. Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany , ed. from the State Office for Monument Preservation Hessen, Theiss Verlag Stuttgart, 2005, 3 volumes in a slipcase, 1,448 pages, ISBN 3-8062-1917-6
- Rolf Reutter: The Fürstenbahnhof - a closed chapter in architectural history . In: Denkmalpflege und Kulturgeschichte 4/2008, Ed .: State Office for Monument Preservation Hesse , pp. 27–30.
- Eduard Schmitt: station building and platform roofing ; JM Gebhardt's publishing house; 1911; Pp. 72–73 and various figs.
- Dirk Strohmann: The reception building of the Detmold train station and its prince's room = workbook of the LWL Office for Monument Preservation in Westphalia 7. Münster 2009. ISBN 978-3-86206-001-6
- Bettina Vaupel: The very highest railway. From imperial train stations, princely rooms and saloon cars . In: Monuments 23rd vol. (2013) No. 3, pp. 9-17.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Strohmann, p. 54 f.
- ↑ Straw man, p. 60.
- ↑ Strohmann, p. 59 with further references; Vaupel, p. 10.
- ↑ In 1910, a prince's room at Wrexen station was given up after it had not been used for more than ten years.
- ↑ Some of the train stations designed by Julius Eugen Ruhl from the mid-19th century, for example in Hofgeismar or Wilhelmsbad .
- ↑ Reutter, p. 27.