![]() ![]() To be an obstacle is to insist on your importance, and Paris and London were certainly obstacles to these travellers. Until recently, a traveller who just wanted to get past Paris or London - someone going from Lyon to Rouen, say, or from Brighton to Cambridge - had to make a double-connection to get across the capital, going from one city end-station to another via the city’s rapid transit system. So is it surprising that the largest, oldest capitals of Europe tend to have end-stations? The largest of all, Paris and London, each feature a distinctive ring of end-stations serving trains to different parts of the country. End stations, then, magnify a city’s importance, while through-stations subliminally diminish it. ![]() ![]() In other words, an end-station is all about arrival and departure in your city, while a through station is really about arrivals and departures elsewhere. In a through-station, the focus of the design is the convenience of all the people riding through the city on the train. On a deeper level, the sensation of an end-station is that the entire space is devoted to arrival and departure. In a tunnel, signs are your only form of wayfinding, while in a large open space of an end station, you can actually see where you’re going much of the time. Arrival in such stations is typically a confusing sensation. The change of grade from the tracks is usually downward, delivering us to an underground passage that must be moved through to get to any sort of larger space. In a through-station such as this typical one in Haarlem, Netherlands, the tracks must continue on both sides of the station, so each platform is just a space between tracks, accessible only by a change of level: stairs, escalators, lifts. The great station hall is the savanna, but the tunnel is more like the jungle, enclosing, disorienting, full of unknowns.) (That we so often experience end-stations as great places suggests that our bodies, adapted for African savanna, really don’t like descending into tunnels, because we don’t like going anywhere that we can’t see clearly. End stations offer the possibility of a continuous flow, at the same level, between the train, the platform, the main hall, and even the street. They don’t have to deal with stairs, escalators or lifts, but can just walk forward, past the end of the train, into the main station space. It’s a nuisance for the trains and their through passengers but it’s great for customers as pedestrians. In an end-station such as Paris’s Gare du Nord (pictured), trains arrive in a stub-end track and must reverse direction to go back out. It’s pointless, for example, to compare New York’s dreary Penn Station, a through-station, with magnificent Grand Central, an end-station. They generate completely different kinds of space and completely different sensations of arrival and departure. It’s brought me back to an old point about station design that not everyone understands: Through-stations and end-stations are completely different design and planning problems. I’ve seen some great rail stations on my just-completed Europe trip, and some problematic ones. ![]()
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