A global railroad renaissance has produced a slew of spectacular new buildings that hark back to the golden age of train travel.

By Jonathan Ringen
December 2001

I recently traveled on the newly opened TGV line between Calais and Marseille; at 186 mph the French countryside was a blur. One month earlier a TGV (train à grande vitesse, or "train of great speed") on this line had broken the world record for a 1,000-kilometer trip (621.3 miles), hitting a top speed of 228 mph and reaching its destination in just under three and a half hours.

We are in the midst of a global railroad renaissance. This boom, which started in the 1980s, has resulted in spectacular new structures like Rafael Moneo's 1992 Atocha Station, in Madrid; Santiago Calatrava's 1998 Oriente Station, in Lisbon; and Bothe-Richter-Teherani's 2000 Frankfurt Airport ICE-Railway Station. Hand in hand with these buildings has been the introduction of bigger, faster trains: the 1996 TGV I rode on; the 300 mph German Transrapid Maglev train linking downtown Shanghai with Pudong International Airport, scheduled to begin service in 2003; and Amtrak's new Acela Express, which will have Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Pennsylvania Station as its hub when it opens in New York in 2005.

The first great era of train travel dates from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first couple of decades of the twentieth. The railroad drove the industrial revolution. Its majestic stations were cathedrals of commerce and monumental urban statements. But by the end of World War II railroads around the world were in steep decline, superseded by the private automobile and the futuristic airplane.

Offsite:
The Art Institute of Chicago's train-station exhibition page can be found at www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/trains.html.
Travel choices are fundamentally rational: people select the mode that offers the most appealing combination of speed, convenience, and price. (Factors like the fear of flying engendered by the events of September 11 are exceptional--but can be financially beneficial for the railroads.) The advantages of train travel--particularly for trips of less than 600 miles--are amplified by traffic that has slowed intercity driving and made suburban airports less accessible.

I arrived in France on the Eurostar train via the Channel Tunnel, the standard-bearer of twenty-first-century railroading. Its London terminus, Waterloo International--designed by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners--opened to travelers in 1993. Its curved steel-and-glass train shed is a beautiful update of soaring Victorian buildings such as Philadelphia's magnificent Broad Street station, which was razed in 1953.

Train stations offer architects the opportunity to make bold visual statements while reshaping the downtown neighborhoods in which they're often located. Even more dramatic than Calatrava's Lisbon design is his plan for the city of Liège, in eastern Belgium, scheduled for completion in 2006. The vast ribbed edifice serves as a bridge connecting two previously distinct parts of town, one residential, the other retail.

Modern Trains and Splendid Stations opened at the Art Institute of Chicago earlier this month and will run through July 29, 2002. All of the images Metropolis used in this article are taken from the exhibition's accompanying book, released last month by Merrell/The Art Institute of Chicago.







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