Blast From The Past – Fall 1987 – One of my favorite places to photograph trains in all of Europe was probably the Main train station in downtown Frankfurt, West Germany. Today of course it’s just Germany, but when I lived there and traveled back to Germany on various photo assignments, it was my favorite off duty location for photographing trains. The station was and still his huge and if I recall correctly it had 24 platforms all under one roof! Can’t say about today, but back then you could wander around the station and out to the end of any platform and photograph the day to day operation of the station and out into the yard. It was a railfans dream locaiton, at leas it was for this one.
According to Wikipedia: Frankfurt (Main) Hauptbahnhof (German for Frankfurt (Main) main station), often abbreviated as Frankfurt (Main) Hbf and sometimes translated as Frankfurt central station, is the busiest railway station in Frankfurt, Germany. The affix “Main” comes from the city’s full name, Frankfurt am Main (“Frankfurt on the Main”). Because of its location in the middle of Germany and usage as a transport hub for long and short distance travelling, Deutsche Bahn refers to it as the most important station in Germany.
The station was built by the contractor Philipp Holzmann with construction starting in 1883. The Central-Bahnhof Frankfurt was finally opened on 18 August 1888. Right on the evening of the opening day, a train ran over the buffer stop and the locomotive was damaged. Over the course of the next few years, the area to the east of the new station, the Bahnhofsviertel, was built; it was completed around 1900. Until the completion of Leipzig Hauptbahnhof in 1915, Frankfurt station was the largest in Europe.
As of today (2014), the 24 platforms with 26 tracks on one level probably make it the world’s largest one-level railway hall.