Qualla: Dortmund Hauptbahnhof

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Palickap, CC BY-SA 3.0. The stained-glass windows above the concourse show a blast-furnace worker, a coal miner, a brewer, a butcher. They were installed in 1952, when the hall was rebuilt over the ruin of an Allied air raid, and they depict the trades that Dortmund expected to have forever. Two of those four are gone now. The windows remained, because nobody had the heart to take them down, and so 190,000 commuters a day pass beneath portraits of jobs the city no longer does.

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Image: Palickap | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof: Three Stations on One Spot

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clic, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first Dortmund station opened on 15 May 1847, a modest brick affair built north of the medieval centre by the Cologne-Minden Railway Company. It sat on an island reached through the old castle gate, and within a decade the level crossings around it had become a notorious obst...

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Image: Clic | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof: The Sober Replacement

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. What rose from the 1944 ruin was not an attempt at imperial grandeur. The new hall, completed in 1952, is a plain shed in the contemporary West German style: long, flat, glazed, functional. The stained-glass windows that depict the city's then-common professions were the one conc...

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Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof: The UFO and the 3do

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stahlkocher, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1997 came the first redevelopment proposal: an 80,000-square-metre residential structure shaped, locals said, like an oversized UFO. Deutsche Bahn, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and Westdeutsche Immobilien Bank signed a memorandum in October 1998 to fund the 850-million...

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Image: Stahlkocher | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof: Working Around the Problem

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0. By summer 2009 Dortmund Hauptbahnhof admitted it could not wait for visionaries any longer. The federal government, the state, and Deutsche Bahn pooled 23 million euros for a phase-one rehabilitation. Workers gutted the station building while the ticket office, a fast-food outlet...

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Image: Tuxyso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof: Hub of a Region That Doesn't Sleep

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DortmunderWestfront, CC BY 3.0. Today the station is the third-busiest long-distance junction in Germany. Thalys high-speed trains run through to Brussels and Paris; Flixtrain and Deutsche Bahn ICE and Intercity services fan out across the country; Regional Express and S-Bahn lines stitch together the Ruhr citi...

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Image: DortmunderWestfront | CC BY 3.0