Aachen West train station
| Aachen West train station | |
|---|---|
 Platform of Aachen West train station
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| Data | |
| Location in the network | Separation station |
| Platform tracks | 2 |
| abbreviation | KAW |
| IBNR | 8000404 |
| Price range | 5 |
| Profile on Bahnhof.de | Aachen_West |
| location | |
| City / municipality | Aachen |
| country | North Rhine-Westphalia |
| Country | Germany |
| Coordinates | 50 ° 46 '48 " N , 6 ° 4' 16" E |
| Railway lines | |
| Railway stations in North Rhine-Westphalia | |
The Aachen West station is a passenger and freight station in the city of Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia . It is a separation station ; the passenger station belongs to station category 5 and has a central platform with two platform tracks. At Aachen West station, the Montzen route to Belgium , which is only used by goods traffic , branches off from the Aachen – Mönchengladbach line .
history
Templar station
On the area between Templergraben and Tower Street, which today for parking , institute building and the lecture hall of the RWTH Aachen is used earlier was inside the station Aachen Templerbend . This was built in 1858 as a replacement for a temporary arrangement that had previously existed at the same location and served as a border station between Germany and the Netherlands . It was designed as an island station and was originally used by both the Aachen-Düsseldorf-Ruhrorter Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft and the Aachen-Maastricht Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft for the Aachen-Maastricht line. On the east side of the city center, trains ran to and from Mönchengladbach , on the west side, only trains to the Netherlands to Maastricht . A fence separated the customs tracks from the other tracks . It was not until 1872 that the later Montzen route to Belgium, which at that time still led via Plombières through the Göhl valley and past Montzen to Welkenraedt , was also connected to the Templerbend station. The building of the station Templerbend had with its two towers and battlements features a castle .
Since the RWTH Aachen expanded at the beginning of the 20th century and took up the space occupied by the Templerbend train station, the new Aachen West train station was built in the immediate vicinity. The relocation of the station also made it necessary to relocate the line to Mönchengladbach between Aachen Templerbend and Richterich . It used to run from the Templerbend train station along the Lousberg, parallel to Roermonder Straße. Most of the old course can still be seen today in aerial photographs . In Laurensberg, the old embankment is still used today as a high promenade for the White Way in the Horse Park. The old railway embankment between Laurensberg and Aachen-Zentrum was interrupted with the construction of the L 232 bypass (Kohlscheider Strasse) in the 1970s.
Westbahnhof
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The Aachen West freight yard was opened on October 1, 1910 together with the new route , the passenger station on October 30, 1910, one day after the Templerbend station was closed and the old route was closed. In 1911 the Templerbend station was finally blown up .
In the Second World War was the reception building from 1910 destroyed after the war it was replaced by a simple construction. This was only used as a reception building until the 1990s, after which a discotheque used the building until 2012 . In January 2013 it was finally demolished to make way for the new campus.
After the Second World War, Aachen West developed into the most important border crossing in European rail freight traffic, and its capacity was fully utilized (in 1974 the million mark in terms of handled freight wagons was reached). For this reason, renovation work began in 1974, estimated at 22 million DM, a second one for the period after 1980 and estimated at 100 million DM, but was no longer implemented due to changed circumstances. During the renovation work in the 1970s, the platforms of the passenger station were relocated from a central position in the track field in front of the dispatcher interlocking further southwest to the edge of the same, adjacent to the premises of the Institute for Rail Vehicles and Conveyor Technology of RWTH Aachen University on Seffenter Weg.
Aachen West train station is easily accessible via the Aachen outer ring and is only connected to the nearby motorway with little disruption for the resident population. It therefore offered good conditions for combined transport . However, the German Federal Railroad closed Aachen West to combined transport in mid-1989, although freight forwarders and shippers in the region were in favor of maintaining this loading point.
The West Campus of RWTH Aachen is to be built on 250,000 m² - around 40% of the current area of the train station . For this purpose, Deutsche Bahn sold the area to the construction and real estate company NRW . Part of the station facilities therefore had to be rebuilt to maintain functionality. On January 15, 2015, the sold areas became the property of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The track systems and the lighting of the marshalling yard were largely modernized during the renovation.
Operating facilities
The reception building on Republikplatz has not been used as such since the early 1990s. Access to the platforms was originally through tunnels below the tracks from the reception building. This can still be seen in the slope behind the location of the reception building. After the platforms were moved to the south-western edge of the site (see above) in the 1970s, access is via a staircase that is accessible from the Seffenter Weg underpass. There is no disabled access, for example via an elevator; There are several smaller shelters on the platform to protect passengers from the weather.
The station building was demolished in January 2013. In its place was a temporary lecture hall building of the RWTH Aachen until 2017. In 2018 another temporary lecture hall building was built on the square.
The dispatcher interlocking Awf ( relay interlocking type Sp Dr S60) is continuously manned due to the freight traffic from and to Belgium that also takes place at night. In addition to the interlocking Awf nor the mechanical is in the station attendant interlocking R2 busy at certain times, which also mechanical signal boxes R1 and R3 are out of service.
Freight transport
Aachen West was the most important freight yard in Aachen. The Aachen-West depot provided the staff and locomotives to carry out the shunting and freight traffic. As a general cargo station, it was closed in 1989. Until the nationwide cessation of general cargo traffic in 1998, Cologne Eifeltor station took over this function. It is still used as a marshalling yard and border station for freight traffic because of the branching off Montzen route to Belgium ; the depot is closed. Since the Montzen route was not electrified until the end of 2008 , the electric locomotives in the station often had to be replaced by diesel locomotives , which led to numerous shunting movements even for trains from or towards Mönchengladbach that could pass through the station without changing direction. In addition to the series 225 and 241.8 of the Deutsche Bahn, locomotives of the NMBS / SNCB series 55 were mainly used for the journey on the Montzen route . After the electrification of the Montzen route has been completed, only a few diesel-powered trips will take place on the route. The mentioned diesel locomotives were u. a. replaced by electric locomotives of the NMBS / SNCB series 28 .
passenger traffic
In terms of passenger traffic, the train station is particularly important because of the nearby RWTH Aachen University. The main building , the Audimax, the CARL , the Kármán Auditorium, numerous institutes, student residences and the Aachen Student Union are all within walking distance . There are also direct bus connections to other university facilities.
Railway lines
The station is served by the following lines by rail passenger transport:
At night, the Wupper-Express also runs the usual route to Düsseldorf main station and on to Düsseldorf Airport Terminal station , where the train ends. This connection enables flights departing from Düsseldorf Airport to be reached early in the morning .
Bus routes
At the train station you can change to public buses to the city center, to the university hospital , to the Melaten campus, to Laurensberg and to Kelmis (Belgium). There are four bus stops , two each on Süsterfeldstraße and Seffenter Weg, which are served depending on the route of the bus route.
Accessibility and the future
The platform can only be reached via a 2.40 m wide staircase, which begins at Seffenter Weg under the railway bridge. In contrast to all other Aachen train stations and stops, access is therefore not barrier-free. The stairs to the platform, where more than 6000 people got on and off every day in 2014, will probably become a capacity bottleneck in the near future, especially due to the development of Campus West. Several studies were carried out for an additional connection via a bridge or through a tunnel, which, however, subsequently resulted in problems, as a bridge over the tracks would be in the field of view of the associated signal box. In the evaluation of eight possible bridge variants and one development variant through a tunnel with northern access at Republikplatz and southern access at Seffenter Weg, the latter variant achieved first place in the ranking, but in the summary the evaluation criteria were described as "questionable". It is therefore still open when and how the legally required accessibility is to be achieved. In 2019, Aachen West was the second most frequented, non-barrier-free station in the NVR area with 3,240 newcomers per day .
From December 13, 2020, the use of double traction units from Siemens Desiro HC in RRX preliminary operation on the Wupper Express is planned. To do this, the platforms at the Aachen Schanz stop must be extended. Due to lawsuits in the planning approval procedure, it is not possible to extend the platforms in due time. In addition, it was determined that a part of the platform in Aachen West was in need of renovation. Therefore, the rear multiple unit has to be locked in both directions with the start of operations without passengers between Herzogenrath and Aachen Hauptbahnhof and a longer evacuation stop has to be planned in Herzogenrath for trips to Aachen. As soon as the renovation of the platform in Aachen West is completed, the evacuation stay is to be relocated to Aachen West. A completion of the platform extension in Aachen Schanz is not foreseeable. According to DB Station & Service , it will only be possible to block the route for construction work in summer 2023.
- Aachen-West train station
Awf dispatcher interlocking with a BR186 locomotive from Alpha Trains
Former building of the Aachen West depot
Tracks and drainage mountain in the western part of the station in 2008, on the right the continuous main tracks
Sculpture in front of the former reception building
Parked electric locomotives in the station, on the right the dispatcher interlocking Awf
See also
Web links
Deutsche Bahn AG:
- Tracks in service facilities (KAW) , DB Netz AG (PDF; 198 kb)
NRWbahnarchiv by André Joost:
Further:
- Helmut Roel: Passenger and freight station Aachen West. In: Railway relics. Helmut Roel, November 1, 2013, accessed November 17, 2013 .
- Current departure plan from Aachen West. Deutsche Bahn , accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- Aachen Westbahnhof. (PDF; 286.79 kB) In: Stop location plans . Aachen Transport Association , August 29, 2012, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- Reinhard Gessen: Aachen-West train station. In: Mining and railways in the Aachen-Düren-Heinsberg region. Reinhard Gessen, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- Walter Buschmann : The Aachen-West depot in Aachen. In: Rhenish industrial culture. Rheinische Industriekultur e. V., accessed November 17, 2013 .
- Stefan von der Ruhren: Aachen West. In: Railways in Aachen and the Euregio Meuse-Rhine. Stefan von der Ruhren, November 12, 2013, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- Westbahnhof (postcard ~ 1930). In: Portal "City History and Urban Development Aachen" - Development of the railway stations. Chair and Institute for Urban Development and Regional Planning, RWTH Aachen University , accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- Guido Rademacher: Aachen West depot. In: Railway in the Aachen area. Guido Rademacher, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- Helmut Roel: Railway depot Aachen West. In: Railway relics. Helmut Roel, August 30, 2013, accessed November 17, 2013 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Station price list 2018 (PDF; 3.78 MB) DB Station & Service , March 8, 2018, accessed on August 28, 2018 .
- ^ A b Werner Consten: German-Belgian railway history - ways out of the Aachen valley basin . In: Railway history . No. 28 (June / July). DGEG Medien, 2008, ISSN 1611-6283 , DNB 025216236 , OCLC 85741206 , p. 22-34 .
- ↑ High promenade on the railway embankment: landscape around Rahe Castle. In: Pferdelandpark - The stations. City of Aachen, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- ^ Stephan Mohne: Armada of excavators paves the way for the Westbahnhof campus. In: Aachener Nachrichten . Aachener Zeitungsverlag, January 22, 2013, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- ↑ Thorsten Karbach: Lecture Hall Center: University erects a system building at Westbahnhof. In: Aachener Nachrichten. Aachener Zeitungsverlag, June 25, 2013, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- ↑ Annika Edelmann, Heinz Leibold in: Klara van Eyll , Otto Eschweiler (ed.): Economic history of the Aachen region from the end of the Second World War to the present. Self-published by the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-933025-34-6 , p. 84.
- ↑ Annika Edelmann, Heinz Leibold in: Klara van Eyll, Otto Eschweiler (ed.): Economic history of the Aachen region from the end of the Second World War to the present. Self-published by the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-933025-34-6 , p. 87.
- ↑ RWTH Campus West. In: Urban Development Projects - Areas for Science. City of Aachen, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- ↑ Verena Müller: Aachen Westbahnhof in 2011 gives way to the major campus project. In: Aachener Nachrichten. Aachener Zeitungsverlag, January 19, 2009, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- ↑ RWTH Aachen Campus West , accessed on March 19, 2018
- ^ Martina Feldhaus: Campus West: Greens push the pace. In: Aachener Nachrichten . Aachener Zeitungsverlag, July 19, 2013, accessed on November 17, 2013 .
- ^ Stephan Mohne: Armada of excavators paves the way for the Westbahnhof campus. From aachener-zeitung.de, accessed on January 26, 2014.
- ↑ RWTH is building provisional lecture halls again. In: Aachener Zeitung. March 27, 2018, accessed August 10, 2019 .
- ↑ guidorademacher.de
- ↑ Excerpt - Aachen West train station - results of the feasibility study for barrier-free access via a new pedestrian bridge. Dec. III / FB 61/300, accessed on January 25, 2016 .
- ↑ Westbahnhof. City of Aachen, accessed on August 28, 2018 .
- ↑ Not step-free stations and number of beginners. (PDF) Zweckverband Nahverkehr Rheinland , 2020, accessed on July 22, 2020 .
- ↑ Zweckverband Nahverkehr Rheinland, 20th meeting of the main committee, item: 12.4, operating program RE 4, 5th June 2020