Last November I had a chance to look around the newly restored station building in Oberursel.  At the time work was still going on inside the building itself.  With the exception of the service store, only the outside had been completed.

That situation has now changed and yesterday I went back to see how the rooms inside have been transformed. (more…)

Many towns in Germany face the same problem – their station building.  Not on a scale with Stuttgart, but given that many of them were built in the 19th Century, they often suffer similar fates such as underused ticket offices, high running costs due to the old building materials, and general desire from travellers and locals for the buildings to be put to better use and provide more services.

At the same time, they expect them to look good and still retain their 19th Century character, and not get covered in graffiti.  With many of them being listed buildings as well, this is not an easy task.  Another complication is that the buildings are often owned by Deutsche Bahn, reducing the lack of influence that local towns have over how they are used.

Oberursel’s station is one of those that had suffered this fate until recently, but for the past three years things have started to change.  An organisation called SEWO, who were originally created by the town itself to re-develop the Camp King area, were able to buy the property from the railway. (more…)

After over a year of protests, the residents of the state of Baden-Württemberg will be voting tomorrow in a referendum on the future of the main station in Stuttgart.

The project, called “Stuttgart 21″, plans to demolish part of the station and take the railway lines underground.  The so-called “Kopfbahnhof”, a station where the tracks end and trains go in and out of, would then become a “Durchgangsbahnhof”, where tracks and trains run through from one side to the other, resulting in a number of changes to the rail network in the area.

A year ago, the politicians were saying that the project had been decided on in a long planning process, and that nothing could be changed.  Then there was a conciliation process (“Schlichtung”) where alternatives where looked at, and apart from the railway being required to prove that the new station would really bring a benefit to the network, not much changed.

However after the local elections in March of this year, the political situation in Baden-Württemberg changed considerably, when the CDU/FDP coalition, who had been in favour of the project lost such a large share of the vote, that a new Green/SPD coalition was formed to take control of the local parliament. (more…)