Building · Gare & Hollerich
Luxembourg Station
A wooden station of 1859, built to be burned if the fortress were besieged, and the Moselle-baroque palace of 1913 that replaced it — the building that pulled a second city out of the fields south of the Pétrusse.
Every big station tells you what a city thought of itself when it was built. This one, with its clock tower and its curly gables, was finished in 1913 at the height of the steel boom, and it looks it. But the first station on this spot was made of wood, and that tells you something too.
In the 1850s Luxembourg was still a fortress of the German Confederation, and its Prussian governor would not have railway lines breaching the walls. Five sites were argued over for years — the Holy Ghost plateau, the Glacis, the Place de l'Étoile, even Clausen with a tunnel under the old town — before a compromise was struck: the station would go outside the fortress, on the Bourbon plateau across the Pétrusse gorge, in what was then the village of Hollerich. Nothing permanent could be built within a thousand metres of the walls, so the station was put up in timber, in the style of a Swiss chalet, so that it could be burnt down in a siege rather than shelter an enemy. It opened in 1859, and Michel Lentz wrote "De Feierwon" — "The Fire-Wagon" — for the celebration, a song the country nearly made its anthem. The first trains went to Thionville and Arlon; within two years a line ran north over a viaduct across the Alzette.
When the fortress was dismantled after 1867 the building ban went with it, and the city spilled across the valley to meet the station — the whole Gare quarter, the Avenue de la Liberté and the Adolphe Bridge exist because the trains stopped here. The wooden chalet lasted half a century. The building you see was put up between 1907 and 1913 to plans by the German architect Alexander Rüdell, in the neo-baroque manner people here call "Moselle baroque"; the entrance hall opened in December 1910 and cost 1.1 million marks against the 860,000 budgeted, because the Luxembourg government kept asking for more — a taller tower, a customs hall, waiting rooms for first and second class. It has been a listed national monument since 1989.
Fifty-two thousand people pass through on an ordinary weekday now, and since 2007 the TGV has run to Paris in a little over two hours. The trams and buses outside make it the point where every line in the country meets, which is what the Prussian governor was afraid of.
