Vienna North Station

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Historic postcard of the north station around 1900

The Vienna North Station was opened in 1838 at the Praterstern . Opened in a new building in 1865, it was the most important and largest train station in the Habsburg Monarchy until 1918 as the starting point for the Kaiser Ferdinand's Northern Railway or the Imperial and Royal Northern Railway . Since the northern line, which went into operation in the first section ( Floridsdorf - Deutsch-Wagram ) in 1837, was the first steam train in the Austrian Empire , the original northern station was also one of the oldest in the country.

1918–1945 the station was still in operation; but its size no longer corresponded to the more modest economic and transport connections to the northeast. Badly damaged in the Battle of Vienna in 1945, the station was only operated as the Vienna North freight station after the Second World War . The functions in passenger transport were initially transferred to the Nordwestbahnhof and from 1959 to today's Vienna Praterstern station , which developed into one of the city's most important transport hubs. In 1965 the historic station building, which until then had been in ruins and, according to today's criteria, should have deserved restoration, was demolished. Since the 1990s, the railway has also withdrawn from the area of ​​the freight station, known since the 2010s as the Nordbahnviertel , where a new district is now emerging.

location

The station was located in the 2nd district of Vienna , Leopoldstadt , in the central city area directly north of the Praterstern , which developed into a major traffic junction. It was accessible for passenger traffic from Nordbahnstraße, for freight traffic mainly from Lassallestraße .

The area around the railway was limited as follows (today's street names):

  • to the west: Nordbahnstrasse and Dresdner Strasse
  • in the north: Innstrasse (border between 2nd and 20th district since 1900)
  • in the northeast: Vorgartenstrasse
  • in the southeast: Lassallestrasse

Today the urban development area of ​​the Nordbahnhof area is also limited, for which the name Nordbahnviertel was used for the sake of simplicity in the 2010s .

To the west of Nordbahnstrasse to Heinestrasse and Taborstrasse adjoins the railway site, the residential area formerly known as Nordbahnviertel , which was built with the train station on the former Donauau site and has been known as the Volkertviertel and Allied Quarter since around 2010 .

history

1. Nordbahnhof (watercolor by Rudolf von Alt , 1851)

The 1st North Station 1838–1865

In the course of the construction of the northern railway by the corporation Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn , the first kk northern station was built in 1837/1838 on the Danube-side edge of the suburb Leopoldstadt and opened on January 6, 1838. The station was located on an island in the unregulated Danube in an area that was still used for agriculture and repeatedly flooded and was laid out next to Forstmeisterallee , which later became Nordbahnstraße . A few hundred meters north of the terminal building, the railway line had to cross an arm of the Danube, the flagpole water . Due to the risk of flooding, the area was filled up and was 4.4 meters above street level.

The area of ​​the station had an area of ​​24,829 m² and was enclosed by a 2.5 m high wall; at the entrance there was a gate that was opened before the first train and closed after the last train. The station had six tracks, eight switches and turntables with 28 connections. There were also workshops and a large number of outbuildings.

In 1850, the area was incorporated into Vienna and declared part of the 2nd district , which means that the train station was also officially in the urban area of ​​Vienna.

The 2nd North Station: The reception salon of the imperial-royal court with wall paintings by Carl Schweninger
Kaiserjäger at roll call at the kk Nordbahnhof before departure for the Austro-Prussian War of 1866

The 2nd North Railway Station 1865–1965

1865-1918

Due to the increasing number of passengers, the station was soon too small and had to give way to a new building. 1859–1865, again not far from the Praterstern , a new, comparatively luxurious station building was built; behind it was the freight station, which at the time of its greatest expansion stretched almost to the banks of the Danube , which was regulated from 1868–1875 . In 1859, the connecting line from the north to the south station began operating .

Several architects were commissioned with the planning; the design in the Moorish style comes mainly from Theodor Hoffmann. The decoration of the rooms was done by sculptors and fresco painters . The opening took place on 15 October 1865. The station building was, as with other major stations this time, a pronounced representative building and was for. B. equipped with a waiting room for the imperial court. A spacious high-rise hall was available for the trains. In the vestibule there was a statue of the founder and main financier of the Northern Railway, Salomon Rothschild , which was made by Johann Meixner in 1869/1870 . It was dismantled by the National Socialists in 1938 and is now on loan from the Technisches Museum Wien in the Jewish Museum Vienna .

Opposite the main entrance of the second north station, the large Hotel Donau was built at Nordbahnstrasse 50 for the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 . The building was later used as the directorate of the Imperial and Royal Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn , then the Vienna Federal Railway Directorate and, placed under monument protection, is still used today by ÖBB offices. Also in 1873 the luxurious Roman bath was opened behind the hotel .

In 1895 gas lighting was replaced by electric light. Around 1900 the station area covered a total of 36 hectares. In 1906 the previously private Northern Railway was incorporated into the Imperial and Royal State Railways , d. H. nationalized.

During the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy until 1918, the North Railway Station was one of the most important railway stations in Europe and, with connections to Brno , Katowice , Krakow and Lemberg, the most important railway station in Vienna. For many immigrants from the crown lands of Galicia , Bukovina , Bohemia and Moravia , it was the gateway to Vienna. The first electric tram line in Vienna, the later (and now) line 5, connected the station with the Nordwestbahnhof , the Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof and the Westbahnhof since 1897 .

The Wien Praterstern stop, which was upgraded to the terminus of the Vienna light rail in 1899 , was operationally separate from the Nordbahnhof, but nevertheless ensured better integration of the same into local and regional transport.

The North Station played an important role in the First World War : many troop transports to the Russian front were dispatched here and the transport of the wounded from the front area was taken over. In 1914/1915 people who had fled the invasion of the Russian army in Galicia arrived here, and in 1917/1918 Austrian soldiers who had been released from Russian captivity.

1918-1945

Nordbahnhof and Praterstern on a city map from around 1925

In the mid-1920s, the Nordbahnhof had two boiler houses, six coal yards, loading tracks with a length of up to one kilometer and a petroleum store. Until 2010 there was a direct connection to the Donauuferbahn near Innstrasse in a semicircular arch.

In March 1938, many who feared persecution fled from the Nazis who were taking power on the northern railway via Lundenburg (Břeclav) to Czechoslovakia. From 1943, Jewish Viennese were deported to extermination camps from the Nordbahnhof ; previously the deportation trains had left the Aspang station.

1945-1965

The area of ​​the north train station today (right)

In the Battle of Vienna in the final phase of World War II , the station was badly damaged by bombs on March 12, 1945 and by artillery in early April 1945. The northern railway bridge over the Danube was unusable until 1957 as a result of the fighting; the Northern Railway trains were up in 1959 by the North West Station via the North West railway bridge out.

With the beginning of the Cold War that followed after 1945 , the borders of the northern and eastern neighboring states were closed, and the northern railway line lost its national importance. (Nevertheless, on city maps from the post-war period it was still possible to read that the Northern Railway ran to Brno, Krakow, Lemberg and Chernivtsi .)

The station building was left to decay and blown up on May 21, 1965. The Viennese historian Georg Rigele commented decades later, the demolition had no protests , no public controversy triggered. It was about the silent, unreflective (at least not debated) breaking off of a historical relationship , about the loss of a ... symbolic place for the Czech, Polish and Jewish part of Vienna's history.

In the years before the demolition, film scenes were made against the backdrop of the station building on Nordbahnstrasse, in which the assassination attempt in Sarajevo in 1914 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956 against the Stalinist regime were reenacted. In the 1955 film Sarajevo - Around Throne and Love , the historic entrance hall of the train station represented the Sarajevo City Hall.

Freight station 1945–2005

From 1945 until after 2000, goods traffic continued to be handled in the north station area . 1945–1955 the station was in the Soviet sector of the city. The iron curtain acted as a traffic barrier until 1989. The ÖBB used the extensive area, among other things, to park rail vehicles that were not (no longer) required, and companies located here also handled traffic in which the railways played little or no role.

After the creation of modern freight transport facilities at other locations, the federal railways and the city ​​administration agreed to gradually open up the site for new uses. In 1979 the first railway area on the north side of Lassallestrasse was released; it was built with office buildings etc. In 1994 the North Station model was adopted. In 2005, the zoning plan was also decided for the large area to the north of the already developed strip on Lassallestrasse. The Rudolf Bednar Park was opened in 2008. In 2011/2012 an urban development competition was held to update the 1994 model, which resulted in the 2014 urban development model; the original plans have been adjusted, see Nordbahnviertel .

literature

Web links

Commons : Wien Nordbahnhof  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Evelyn Klein, Gustav Glaser: Periphery in the city. The Vienna Nordbahnviertel. Insights, explorations, analyzes , StudienVerlag, Innsbruck 2006, ISBN 978-3-7065-4189-3
  2. ↑ Klein, Glaser, p. 30
  3. ^ Felix Czeike : Historisches Lexikon Wien , Volume 4, Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-218-00546-9 , p. 417
  4. ^ Statue of Salomon Mayer Freiherr von Rothschild, from the vestibule of the Nordbahnhof , on Google Arts & Culture , accessed on June 7, 2020
  5. ^ Roman Sandgruber : Rothschild. Glory and decline of the Viennese world house . Molden Verlag, Vienna 2018, p. 468
  6. ↑ The Nordbahnhof on tramway.at, accessed on April 4, 2020
  7. ↑ 50 years of the Wien Museum . Advertising brochure April 2009, published by the Wien Museum, with a facsimile of a traffic plan around 1950
  8. ↑ Georg Rigele: Breaking off a historical relationship . In: Website Der Standard , May 31, 2002, printed edition from April 1, 2002 June 2002