Marshalling yard Hagen-Vorhalle

Marshalling yard Hagen-Vorhalle

The Hagen-Vorhalle station is a large marshalling yard of national importance and a small passenger station mainly for local traffic in the city of Hagen in North Rhine-Westphal.

The station was first opened on March 9, 1849, when due to the efforts of the German businessman Friedrich Wilhelm Harcourt, in 1848 the Brandenburg Railway Company built the Elberfeld-Dortmund railway section with a station in the city of Hagen. This was the impetus for the fact that Hagen quickly developed into an industrial center of the metallurgical and metalworking industries. After the opening of the Ruhr-Siegen railway section in 1861, the station in the city of Hagen began to play the role of an important railway junction in the Ruhr region.

The modern neo-baroque station building was inaugurated on September 14, 1910. A year later, with funds from the German collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, the Dutch artist Jan Thorn-Prikker created a stained glass window that adorns the main front window of the station.

Passenger station

During the Second World War, with the numerous bombings by British aviation, the Hagen station, unlike most stations in North Rhine-Westphalia, was practically not damaged. Both the station and the glazed awnings over the platforms have retained their appearance almost unchanged since the beginning of the 20th century.

The station has 5 platforms (2 straight, 3 curved) 9 meters wide and 140-460 meters long. Several long-distance trains InterCity and Intercity-Express pass through the station, as well as regional-Express local trains, Regionalbahn commuter trains and S-Bahn trains.

From autumn 2004 to spring 2006, within the preparation for the World Cup, there were restoration works at the station. Despite significant modernization, the architectural appearance of the building was carefully preserved. In total, 1.2 million euros were spent on the restoration and modernization of the station complex. Today, the station releases about 30000 passengers daily.

On the north side of the Hagen Passenger Station there is a marshalling yard, one of the largest in the region.

Marshalling yard

The marshalling yard has eleven arrival routes, two slides and 40 classification trails up to 920 meters long. The Hagen-Vorhalle marshalling yard was also upgraded between 2004 and 2006 by DB Netz (a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn). The fully automated system was commissioned in January 2007. The modernization has significantly reduced the number of employees in the park.

Freight wagons, or sets of wagons, pass over the hill and are then braked by a series of automatic retarders and finally assembled together for coupling. The wagons are connected with brake hoses and the brakes are tested using a remote controlled brake testing system. The whole sorting operation is automatically controlled by a central electronic interlock. The intervention of the signaling devices is only necessary in the case of a malfunction.

The Hagen-Vorhalle station is one of the nine largest marshalling yards in Germany and a key element of the 200X program to modernize Germany’s freight infrastructure, which was initiated in 2006 by the former Railion Deutschland AG (now DB Schenker Rail).

Railway magazine “Railway Supply”

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