Angela Merkel Inaugurates New Central Station and Tunnel in Berlin as Germany Hosts Football World Cup Berlin inaugurated its new central station on 26th May, 2006. The new station is an imposing 340 m-long arching steel-and-glass hall encompassing twin towers in the heart of the capital on the former border between capitalist West and communist East. The station opened for regular service on 28th May, less than two weeks before the football World Cup begins.The multi-layered Hauptbahnhof, or main station, is Europe's biggest railway junction, creating a major east-west and north-south rail intersection in the heart of Berlin. It sits atop a new 3.6 km north-south tunnel built beneath the Spree river and the Tiergarten at 15 metres below the surface. The new north-south tunnel, through which eight railway lines connect Berlin with Hamburg and Munich and beyond, will eliminate the need for trains to destinations such as Leipzig and Munich to make a time-consuming detour around the edge of the city and will cut around half an hour off journey times to some destinations. Long-distance trains will no longer stop at the Zoologischer Bahnhof, or Zoo station, that functioned as West Berlin's main station throughout the Cold War. On the upper level of the five-storey station, six tracks link the capital on an east-west axis with Paris and Moscow. Metro and tram connections are still under construction. North-south traffic will be concentrated in the Tiergarten tunnel, which will reduce journey times significantly, e.g. by 40 minutes on both the Berlin-Stralsund and Berlin-Leipzig lines. Long-distance trains travelling through the Tiergarten tunnel include the Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig-Munich, Hamburg-Berlin-Dresden-Prague and Stralsund-Berlin-Erfurt services. The Tiergarten tunnel will provide capacity relief to the very busy east-west line, on which the Cologne-Hannover-Berlin, Basel/Stuttgart-Frankfurt-Berlin and Berlin-Osnabrueck-Amsterdam/Muenster services will continue to operate. The station design allows daylight to filter down into its underground platforms, some 40 metres below the roof. The station is situated close to the Reichstag parliament building and the new chancellery. In total, together with regional services, 1,100 trains will transit daily through the new station, with trains departing every 90 seconds, and 300,000 passengers a day are expected to use the station's 54 escalators and 34 elevators. Even in its bowels, the Hauptbahnhof lives up to its glass cathedral reputation, as the underground concourse is flooded with shafts of daylight that penetrate its 9,000-pane roof. Construction took eight years (11 years with the tunnel) and has an estimated cost of EUR700 million. The two 46 m-high towers will be finished next year. Visit www.hbf-berlin.de 23/06.