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Berlin Ostbahnhof (East Station) is a mainline Railway Station in Berlin , Germany . It is located in Friedrichshain , now part of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, and has undergone several name changes in its history. (It was known as '''Berlin Hauptbahnhof''' from 1987 to 1998, a name that has been reapplied to Berlin's New Central Station .) Alongside Berlin Zoologischer Garten station it is one of the city's two main stations; however, it is likely to decline in significance when the new Hauptbahnhof opens in mid- 2006 , and many mainline trains are re-routed through the new Tiergarten tunnel, bypassing the Ostbahnhof. HISTORY The station was opened in 1842 as Frankfurter Bahnhof as a terminus to the new 100-km railway line that connected Berlin to Frankfurt (Oder) . The first building was slightly north of its present location. In 1845 , it was renamed '''Niederschlesisch-Märkischer Bahnhof''' ( Lower Silesia - Brandenburg Station) after a railway merger. When the railways were taken over by the Prussia n state in 1852 , the station was renamed '''Schlesischer Bahnhof''' ( Silesia Station). It was rebuilt on the present site in 1882 when construction began on the Berlin Stadtbahn (the elevated railway through the city center built to link the city's major stations, completed in 1886 ). Two of the four tracks on the Stadtbahn later came to form one of the main routes of the Berlin S-Bahn suburban railway. (The Ostbahnhof has, however, never had a link to the Berlin U-Bahn subway, nor is one planned.) The station was severely damaged in the Second World War and completely rebuilt by the East German railway, the Deutsche Reichsbahn ; in 1950 it was renamed Berlin Ostbahnhof, as Silesia was now largely in Poland . Following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 the station was, alongside Berlin-Lichtenberg Station , one of two major railway stations in East Berlin . [The wall ran only 200 meters away from the station; today that part is the East Side Gallery , the longest remaining fragment of the Berlin Wall.) In 1987 the postwar building was demolished and the station began to be rebuilt as East Berlin’s main station, grandly renamed Berlin Hauptbahnhof (Berlin Central Station). The plan called for a hotel and a large reception area for arriving Soviet Bloc dignitaries. However, only part of the work was complete by the time of German Reunification in 1990 . A partially built staircase to the underground car park from this period in front of the station remains (as of 2006 ) unfinished and is fenced off. A partly constructed hotel was demolished in the early 1990s. The name ''Hauptbahnhof'' remained long after the division of Berlin ended, until 1998 , when the station was finally re-renamed Berlin Ostbahnhof. One year later, work began to demolish the station and rebuild it once again, which was completed in 2002 . Little remains of the 1980s structure except for an administrative block, some façade elements, and parts of the platform structure. |
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