Dresden-Friedrichstadt station is a freight yard that is, along with the two passenger stations of Dresden Hauptbahnhof and Dresden-Neustadt, a central component of the railway node of Dresden in the German state of Saxony. The station precinct, which is located in the Dresden district of Friedrichstadt, also includes a locomotive depot (Bahnbetriebswerk Dresden) and a regional passenger station.
The Berliner Bahnhof, that is the terminus on the line from Berlin, was opened on the site in 1875. A marshalling yard was built from 1890 as a gravity yard, along with a repair shop (Ausbesserungswerk)—which was called the Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk Dresden from 1920—and the locomotive depot. After major destruction as a result of the air raids on Dresden during the Second World War, rebuilding began in 1945. By the turn of the century, its significance had diminished. Until the end of hump operations in 2009, it was along with the Leipzig-Engelsdorf marshalling yard, the only remaining yard in Saxony to handle wagonload freight. After the turn of the millennium, it was redeveloped as a yard for the transhipment of combined transport.
Location
The freight yard is located west of the historic old town (Altstadt). The yard extend over two kilometres from east to west. It extends over the entire south-western part of the district of Friedrichstadt and as a result it is largely located in the old town. Its north-western point is in the middle of the district of Cotta; in the southeast it almost reaches into the district of Wilsdruffer Vorstadt, which is part of the old town.
The canalised Weißeritz flows south of the yard towards the Elbe, which it reaches shortly after it has passed under the westernmost part of the marshalling yard. The eastern part of the yard is also close to this river, which runs from the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge), or its former bed, making it prone to flooding.
The yard is officially located 230 metres from the end of the Berlin–Dresden railway, which extends in the city from its centre to the Elbe bridge in Niederwartha and Cossebaude. It is accessed from the junction of the Leipzig–Dresden railway with the line from Berlin to the northwest of Dresden near the border between the towns of Coswig and Radebeul; it is also accessed there by rail freight traffic from Leipzig. The passenger traffic to and from the northwest, for example Dresden S-Bahn services, mainly use the Leipzig line via Pieschen and Dresden-Neustadt station.
Immediately east of the Dresden-Friedrichstadt yard, the Berlin–Dresden railway meets the inner-city link between the neighbouring stations of Dresden Hauptbahnhof and Dresden-Neustadt at a wye junction. This connects the line with the Dresden–Děčín, Dresden–Werdau and Dresden–Görlitz railways. The next station away from the city is Dresden-Cotta station. To the west of the station, a short line branches to the north to the river port of Alberthafen and is used exclusively for the transport of goods. This is located just one kilometre north of the yard and the two facilities work together to handle multimodal transport. Among other things, the port has had a roll-on/roll-off facility able to handle a permissible maximum load of 500 tonnes since 2007.
Function and infrastructure Freight traffic
The freight yard handles rail freight traffic in the following types of traffic:
changes of locomotives for cross-border block train traffic and transhipment of containers and swap bodies in combined transport. The main part of the yard is a one-sided marshalling yard with 34 tracks. Until the decommissioning of the hump, it was used for the division and assembly of trains in wagonload freight. Its highest point is slightly west of signal box 9. Shunting locomotives pushed the trains with decoupled wagons onto the track over the hump from which they rolled off and were routed by the setting of points to a target track.
A modern freight village lies immediately south of the station area on Potthoffstraße. The transhipment yard for combined transport has two entry and exit tracks, four loading tracks with adjoining storage areas and two gantry cranes. The transhipment yard can handle a maximum of 90,000 containers or swap bodies annually.
Passenger traffic
A small part of the station is used for passenger operations. This is served by a local transport service, the RB 31 from Dresden Hbf to Elsterwerda via Coswig and Großenhain, but it is not served by the Dresden S-Bahn. There are few possibilities for transferring to/from public transport services operated by the Dresdner Verkehrsbetriebe, the public transport company. North of the station, the Waltherstraße stop is served by bus route 94, which runs between Postplatz and Niederwartha, and by tram line 1 from Leutewitz to Prohlis. The Semmelweisstraße stop on tram line 2 from Gorbitz to Kleinzschachwitz lies south of the station. Line Route Interval (min) Operator Dresden Hbf – Dresden-Friedrichstadt – Coswig (b Dresden) (– Großenhain Cottb – Elsterwerda – Elsterwerda-Biehla) 60 DB Regio Nordost
History
Berliner Bahnhof (Berlin line station) Before the building of the first station in Friedrichstadt, it was the location of the powder magazines of the Saxon Army; they were relocated with the concentration of the barracks of Dresden in Albertstadt on the edge of the Prießnitz flood plain. The first station on the site was the Berliner Bahnhof (the terminus of the line to Berlin) and its entrance building was on Berliner Straße. This station, which was built between 1873 and 1875, was the terminus of the then private Berlin-Dresdener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft (Berlin-Dresden Railway Company), which built the line between the capitals of Saxony and Prussia. Its other terminus was the Dresdener Bahnhof, 174.2 km away in Berlin. Rail freight and passenger services between Berlin and Dresden began on 17 June 1875. Thus, the line to Berlin is the newest of the five railways ending in Dresden that were built in the 19th century. It was 38 years after the first German long-distance railway was completed from Dresden to Leipzig, which terminated at the Leipziger Bahnhof.
The passenger station consisted of a relatively small entrance building, which was built like a large urban villa in the Romanesque style, next to a 180-metre-long platform and a similarly covered 200 metre-long island platform. Two transit tracks led past the platforms to the then Böhmischen Bahnhof ("Bohemian station"). Just south of it were two more tracks for the use of "excursion trains" that ran to a turntable on the east side. In order to establish a fast road connection to the passenger station, a street was built in the 1870s that was named Berliner Straße after the station.
The freight facilities of the Berliner Bahnhof extended for over 1000 metres. This large area allowed the building of the marshalling yard in the 20th century. Five dead-end tracks, a loading ramp and a transfer crane were used to transport livestock and commodities and four dead-end tracks with two external goods sheds handled general freight traffic. The goods sheds, with large attached freight-handling areas on their eastern side, are still preserved. Between the freight-handling buildings there was a traverser for transferring locomotives between the four tracks. Four wagon turntables linked the tracks to the entrance track. Locomotive maintenance facilities, consisting of a twelve-stall locomotive shed, a watering point and a coal loader were located at the western station exit. The Berliner Bahnhof was already important for freight traffic in the early years. This was a result in particular of the fact that the city council had declared the district of Friedrichstadt to be a factory district in 1878. As a result, important industrial companies, such as the sewing machine manufacturer, Seidel & Naumann, the Dresden flour mill, the Yenidze cigarette factory and the municipal slaughterhouse gradually settled there.
Nationalisation and redevelopment planning Due to the financial difficulties of the private railway company, it was taken over by the Prussian state railways in 1877 and, as a result, the Berliner Bahnhof also passed into the possession of the Prussian state in 1887. A year later, the section of the line between Elsterwerda and Dresden, which was largely located in Saxony, was sold to the Royal Saxon State Railways, which operated the station from 1 April 1888.
In the 1890s, all of Dresden's railway lines, which by then were all state-owned, were connected, creating the Dresden rail node. In the vicinity of the old terminal stations that were no longer required for passenger traffic, facilities dedicated to freight traffic were built, among others at the Leipziger Bahnhof and at the Dresden-Altstadt locomotive depot on the railway to Chemnitz. This process also took place at the Berliner Bahnhof, which closed for passenger traffic when the developing Hauptbahnhof (main station) became the new terminus for passenger trains from Berlin. Several buildings of the old Berliner Bahnhof remained on Waltherstraße, while the station building was later demolished.
Reconstruction of the marshalling yard between 1890 and 1894
At about the same time as the closure of the Berliner Bahnhof, the Dresden-Friedrichstadt marshalling yard was completed immediately south of it and it went into service on 1 May 1894. Designed as a one-sided gravity yard, all tracks, apart from the entry and exit groups, lay on a slope of 1:100. Because of its situation in the middle of the flat Elbe valley, a hump was built from the spring of 1891. In order to provide material for it—a total of 1,55 million cubic metres was needed—the neighbouring basin of the river port of Alberthafen and the trough in the Ostragehege were excavated at the same time. The highest point of the yard, which was kilometre-long, was located at the northwest end and was 17.73 metres above the level of the lowest point under the Waltherstrasse bridge. Shunting engines pulled wagons up the five-track runoff hump, which each wagon would roll off and be directed by points towards a destination track.
A new island platform including an entrance building was built for the local passenger traffic some 100 metres to the west of the former passenger station. Passenger trains used the new facilities from 15 October 1892. The station building was not rebuilt after heavy damage in the Second World War, although a service building was built on the basement and foundations of the less formal eastern part. The railway facilities for passenger and freight traffic covered a total of over 54.4 hectares; the length of track at their opening totalled 76.7 kilometres.
In 1894, the railway administration opened a partially contiguous railway settlement in the immediate vicinity of the station. These included five buildings on the Weißeritz at 54 to 72 Emerich-Ambros-Ufer as well as several houses on Flügelweg. These clinker brick buildings have been preserved to this day. To the south of the marshalling yard, the Saxon State Railways also had a large rail workshop, which opened in November 1894, and a railway depot, which was opened at the same time as the station.
Renovation during the 1920s and 1930s Originally two to three brakemen were distributed on the train, who were responsible for the braking of the individual separated wagons. They operated hand spindle brakes or alternatively beam brakes on wagons without spindle brakes. In both cases the operating speed was dependent on the loading condition of the wagon and the condition of the brakes. In addition to this disadvantage, communication problems between the shunter and the brakemen made operations difficult. The curvature of the tracks prevented visual contact and acoustic signals could not reliably overcome wind and noise. In the case of hump operations, the supervisors often interrupted the process too early for safety reasons.