Praha hlavní nádraží is the largest railway station in Prague, Czech Republic. It opened in 1871 as Franz Josef Station, after Franz Joseph I of Austria. During the First Republic and from 1945 to 1948 the station was called Wilson Station (), after the former President of the United States Woodrow Wilson.
The station is the largest Art Nouveau monument in the Czech Republic. Since 31 December 1976, it has been a cultural monument of the Czech Republic and since 1993 it has been part of the urban monument zone of Vinohrady, Žižkov and Vršovice.
In 2014, the station served 224,505 trains (610 daily) and more than 53,000,000 passengers (90,000 daily) and a number of regional, national and international trains, for which it is often the starting or final station. The station is connected to Prague Metro Line C and the Hlavní nádraží railway station.
Overview Initial construction
The imperial decision of October 1866 to demolish the walls contributed to the construction of the railway station in the current location. The station has been in operation since 14 December 1871, when the southbound Emperor Franz Joseph Railway service to Benešov, Tábor and Vienna started from it. At the time, the station was known as "Franz Josef Station".
In 1872, the was terminated at a separate station close to the Emperor František Josef Railway station. The two stations soon merged. The was also put into operation on the Smíchov (), Prague and Hrabovka (connected to the Austrian Northwestern Railway) routes, thus connecting the stations of four different companies. The led the railways to Vienna and Smíchov separately, only after the double-tracking of the connecting railway in 1901 were the two lines connected already in front of the Vršov portal.
The original narrative building was built according to the design of Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann and Antonín Viktor Barvitius in a Renaissance Revival style. The 150-metre-long building with two towers, a hall with a coffered ceiling, a restaurant, offices and 22 doors leading to a mosaic-paved platform has earned the nickname "castle station". was founded in front of the station in 1876.
Art Nouveau station construction (1901–1909)
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the capacity of the original building and track was no longer sufficient for the development of the railway, so the station was therefore rebuilt and enlarged. The Art Nouveau station building and station hall were built between 1901 and 1909, designed by Czech architect Josef Fanta on the site of the old dismantled Neo-Renaissance station designed by Czech architects Antonín Viktor Barvitius and Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann.
The dome above the main part of the building is decorated with art nouveau motifs and sculptures by Stanislav Sucharda and Ladislav Šaloun depicting Czech cities. The cash desks were located on the ground floor of the dome in the premises of today's cafe. Passengers were served by generously designed waiting rooms in the left wing of the building and two restaurants of different price levels. From the beginning, the building also had offices and lounges for important guests, where for example Tomáš Masaryk, Thomas Edison, Le Corbusier or Charlie Chaplin waited for the train. The lounges were luxuriously furnished, decorated with sculptures and large-scale paintings with motifs of Prague and Karlštejn from the studios of Václav Jansa and Viktor Stretti. The lounges are closed to the public and are used for special occasions or are rented out for commercial purposes. Underpasses were built together with the new building, the railway yard was roofed in 1905–1906 by a two-nave steel arched hall with a span of 2 x 33.3 m, a height of 18 m and a length of 233 m, the authors of which were Jaroslav Marjanko and Rudolf Kornfeld. The construction was made by the S. Bondy bridge factory in . The hall covers the current platforms no. 1 to 4, platform no. 1A is pushed out from the main roof to the Vinohrady headland, the later built platforms 5 to 7 have their own roof, which in shape refers to the structure of the hall.
20th-century electrification and expansion As early as 1910, the Austrian Ministry of Transport began to consider the electrification of the railways in Vienna and Prague. At that time, the businessman Emil Kolben made an offer to the Austro-Hungarian State Railways to electrify the Prague junctions with a 10 kV 16 Hz system, but it was not accepted.Pohl J.: Rychlá železniční osobní doprava, díl 31., Železniční magazín 8/2011, M-Presse plus, Praha The Ministry of Railways of the Czechoslovak Republic began to deal with the idea of electrification again immediately after its establishment. At the beginning of 1924, a direct current system of 1500 V was chosen as the optimal one. On 12 August 1926, in the presence of František Křižík and locomotive E 407.001, construction work was ceremonially started. On 23 April 1928, a shift to electric traction began at Wilson station, and on 27 April, electric traction passenger trains started to Vysočany. With the new timetable, regular electric operation on all electrified lines began on 15 May 1928. Power supply and charging of battery locomotives was provided by the Křenovka transformer station.Schreier, P.: Začátky elektrizace pražských tratí, týdeník Železničář na www.cd.cz The locomotives were deposited in the boiler room at Wilson Station, which was railed.
After the First World War, the line to Smíchov was double-tracked. In 1926, the monorail connection – Prague-Libeň railway station was completed; Vítkov track), which completed the monorail coupling on the other side of the hill, via Hrabovka, in 1872.
In 1940 to 1944, the was built. All traffic was transferred to it so that the reconstruction of the first tunnel could be carried out. After its completion, the tracks to Vršovice and Smíchov were definitively divided.
Construction of the subway, new vestibule and highway (1967–1979)
After the Second World War, a number of studies were prepared for the reconstruction of the station in connection with the increase of its capacity. Josef Danda was particularly involved in them. In 1948, Josef Danda and Antonín Bloman prepared a study predicting the extension of the track to the area of the historic building and its replacement with a new building. In the years 1948–1956, other proposals were created (authors Josef Danda, Cyril Suk, collectives of the project institutes and Stavoprojekt). In 1950, a competition was held for the overall solution of the central station, including an underground railway. At the beginning of the 1960s, an internal competition took place in SUDOP (in which designs were created by architects Homoláč and Reiterman, Jaroslav Otruba, and Josef Danda). In 1965, a public competition was announced, in which the design of the collective Eugen Kramár, Berta Hornema, J. Gerstbrein won, proposing the abolition of the historic building. In 1970, an open architectural competition was announced for the design of the check-in hall, in which the design of architects Jan Šrámek, Jan Bočan and Alena Šrámková won in the second round, which was finally implemented.Nová odbavovací hala, Památkový katalog
The station was extended by a new terminal building, built between 1972 and 1979, including an underground metro station and a main road on the roof of the terminal. The new terminal building claimed a large part of the park, and the construction of the road cut off the neo-renaissance station hall from the town.
In 1976, the Department of Culture of the National Committee of the Capital City of Prague decided, on the proposal of the Prague Centre for State Heritage Care and Nature Protection, that object No. 300 (Fanta's building) is an immovable cultural monument and is entered into the state list of immovable cultural monuments.Detail dokumentu: Rozhodnutí o prohlášení za KP, objekt čp. 300, k. ú. Vinohrady, Metainformační systém NPÚ
An underground tram can be seen on the design from 1948. Competitions for the form of modifications took place between 1950 and 1965. On 15 March 1967, the construction of the Hlavní nádraží metro station (the first and oldest metro station in Prague) began, according to the first plans, as an underground tramway. The government decided to build a subway instead of a tram only after the start of construction, in August 1967, which is why the less typical station has two side platforms instead of one in the middle.
On 9 May 1974, the metro station Hlavní nádraží started operating. From 1972 to 1979, a new underground check-in hall was created on the basis of an architectural competition (stylistically classified as brutalism), which gave way to a part of the existing Vrchlické sady. The authors of the new building were Josef Danda, Jan Bočan, Julie Trnková and Alena Šrámková and Jan Šrámek. The North-South highway runs along the roof of the hall, thus cutting off the historic building from the surroundings.
Track reconstruction (1983–1994)
In the years 1983–1989, the third Vinohradsky tunnel was completed on the south side of the station, which was already under construction in the 1940s. In 1985, the switches and safety equipment were reconstructed on the northern head. Until then, mechanical traffic lights worked here, and switches were rebuilt manually. The Sakrabonka signal box standing on the site of the former homestead of the same name, which gave way in 1870 to the construction of the railway station, was demolished.Historie obce Voděrádky na www.voderadky.com In 1994, three more platforms were opened at the main station, with numbers 5 to 7 having separate vaulted roofs. The reconstruction of the northeastern head of the main station was completed in 2005.
Construction of the New Connection (2006–2017) The technical condition of the station was poor at the beginning of the 21st century, the historic building was dilapidated, the underground vestibule did not meet current requirements, and the track did not meet the capacity or permitted speed. The Czech branch of the Italian company Grandi Stazioni was supposed to lease the station from the then owner – České dráhy – for a 30-year lease in exchange for its complete reconstruction. The station track and with it the historic steel hall (except for the 1st platform) remained in the property of the Správa železnic, which carried out reconstruction activities independently of the Grandi Stazioni. Together, since 2006, under the direction of Grandi Stazioni, it has been possible to modernize the underground check-in hall and the central part of the historic Art Nouveau building (the SŽDC was preparing the reconstruction of other parts of the building) and at the same time, under the baton of the SŽDC, the opening of the Nové spojení and the associated reconstruction of the underpasses and platforms 1–4 took place, and finally, after a pause of several years, the repair and glazing of the historic hall above the platforms.
Reconstruction of tracks and platforms
Due to the construction of the New Connection and the moral obsolescence of many technical and construction units, SŽDC implemented several consecutive projects. To enable the connection to the future New Connection, new bridges over Seifertova Street were built in advance in 2002, from 1 July 2004 to 31 May 2010, the construction of the New Connection took place in cooperation with it from 7 January 2008 to 30 April 2009 modernization the western part of the main station. This included the construction of new platforms 1 to 4, including a shelter over parts of the platforms outside the historic hall. The underpasses, in which escalators and elevators were installed, also underwent reconstruction. At the same time as these works, the reconstruction of the track, traction line and safety equipment and the reconstruction of the entire northern head for the mouth of the New Connection flyover was also taking place.