Germany's Great Railway Stations

This page was once a single embedded film: a timelapse of German railway stations that ran on Vimeo, shot by Holger Mette, and it was good enough that we built a post around it and said so.

It has gone. The video's Vimeo page no longer plays, the account that uploaded it has been deleted, and the blog post we linked for more detail is off the web too. There is no copy of it we can find. We have left the page here because the thing it was really about, the stations themselves, has not gone anywhere.

Why the stations are worth your attention

Germany built its railway stations at the moment when a railway company wanted to be seen as a civic institution, and it shows. These are not transport sheds. Several of them are the most impressive building in their city that is not a church.

Which means the ten minutes you spend waiting for a connection is not dead time, if you look up.

The ones to arrive in

Leipzig Hauptbahnhof. The largest railway station in Europe measured by floor area, with a frontage that runs for close to 300 metres. It was built with two separate halves because Saxony and Prussia each ran their own railway and neither would share a booking hall. There are now three levels of shops under the platforms, which sounds like vandalism and somehow is not.

Hamburg Hauptbahnhof. One enormous iron and glass span over the tracks, and among the busiest stations in the country. Stand on the bridge across the middle at rush hour and you get the scene the timelapse was made of.

Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. A terminus, which is the point: the tracks stop dead under three great arched halls and everything has to turn around. Most of Germany's long-distance network passes through here at some point.

Dresden Hauptbahnhof. Rebuilt with a translucent roof by Norman Foster's office, finished in the 2000s, and it lets in a quality of light that no other big German station manages.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof. The opposite argument. Opened in 2006, glass and steel, trains crossing over each other on five levels. Nobody would call it romantic. It is genuinely impressive to stand in.

And in the other direction entirely, Cologne, where the station was put up so close to the cathedral that walking out of the front doors delivers the single best arrival in Germany. You come up the steps and it is simply there, filling the sky.

Seeing them from a train

You do not need a plan for this, just a reason to be on the network. Deutsche Bahn sells Super Sparpreis and Sparpreis advance fares in limited numbers up to a year ahead, and the walk-up Flexpreis is several times the price, so booking early is the whole game.

For a slower version, the Deutschlandticket costs 63 euros a month as of January 2026 and covers every regional train, S-Bahn, tram and bus in the country. It does not cover ICE, IC or EC. A month of it and a loose itinerary is the cheapest way anyone has yet devised to see a lot of Germany from a train window.