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| Union Station, Chicago Photo: Bruce Leighty/Getty Arriving at Union Station transports you back to Chicago in the 1920s, when the Second City was building some of the most architecturally ambitious projects anywhere in the world. Now the third-busiest station in the country, Union Station is a riot of marble and glass that soars more than 100ft into the air. The soaring, skylit Great Hall is a fantastic place to wait for a train. Unfortunately, the train you'll be getting on will probably be a rundown Amtrak job. |
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| Antwerp Central Photo: Juergen Ritterbach/Getty Inspired partly by the Pantheon in Rome, the main railway station of the Flemish capital is closer to a palace than a transportation hub. It's obscenely extravagant – featuring 20 different kinds of marble. In fact, it's hard to look at all its lavishness and not be reminded of what paid for it: Belgium's horrific colonial enterprise. But as WG Sebald wrote in Austerlitz, a novel set partly at Antwerpen Centraal, "when we step into the entrance hall we are seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade". |
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| Milano Centrale Photo: Vincenzo Lombardo/Getty We all know the stupid excuse for fascism: at least Mussolini made the trains run on time. That was a myth – but Milan's monumental central station is real, and its problematically beautiful combination of neoclassical and Art Deco styles still packs a punch. The train shed is a tremendous steel structure, joined up to a gargantuan marble station, 200m wide with motifs scrolls and eagles' wings fixed into the walls. |
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| Haydarpasa Terminal, Istanbul Photo: Izzet Keribar/Getty Western Europeans may be more familiar with Sirkeci Terminal, the end of the line for the Orient Express. But Istanbul's more impressive station, a castle-like affair surrounded on three sides by water, is on the other side of the Bosphorus. Its future is uncertain, however. Damaged by fire in 2010, the station is currently closed. Although there had been plans for Haydarpasa to serve as the terminus for high-speed trains to Ankara, it may end up as a hotel or shopping center. |
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| Hungerburgbahn stations, Innsbruck Photo: Markus Bstieler/View They service only a 1.8-km funicular track, but the four swooping stations that Zaha Hadid designed for this Austrian alpine town are the most aesthetically ambitious rail stations of the 21st century. Each of the stations features the British-Iraqi architect's signature fluid forms, inspired by glaciers and ice formations. |
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| Southern Cross Station, Melbourne Photo: Kylie Mclaughlin/Getty Melbourne's transport hub, which until 2005 was known as Spencer Street Station, used to consist of some shabby concrete structures that barely joined up. It has now been unified under a new undulating roof that covers an entire city block. The roof keeps the station cool in the long Victorian summers, and it also allows fumes from the trains to escape through perforations cut in the top. |
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| Atocha station, Madrid Photo: Manuel Martín Vicente/Flickr Like many 19th-century railway stations in European capitals, Atocha was built in a wrought-iron style, with the platforms lit through massive skylights. (Gustave Eiffel collaborated on the design.) But what makes Atocha stand out today is something else: after a successful modern addition in the 1990s, the old section has been converted into a massive botanical garden, where passengers waiting for trains can see more than 260 varieties of plants under the vaulted ceiling. There are even turtles! |
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| Grand Central Terminal, New York Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty In the late 1960s, the finest railway station in America nearly suffered the same fate as the old Penn Station, when developers attempted to replace the Beaux-Arts terminal with an office building. But Grand Central, thanks in large part to a campaign by Jackie Kennedy, survived – and is looking better than ever in this its 100th anniversary year. With its Tiffany clock on the south facade and its spiffed-up zodiac mural in the central concourse, it's a tourist destination in its own right and one of the rare stations worth lingering in for a meal or a drink. The oldest establishment in the station is the Grand Central Oyster Bar, on the lower level; the bivalves there are all right, yes, but the martinis upstairs at the Campbell Apartment bar are even finer. One knock against Grand Central: the incongruous, disruptive Apple Store that has taken up residence on the eastern staircase. |
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| Newcastle Central Photograph: Grazyna Bonati/Getty Britain has no shortage of impressive railway stations, from the renovated St Pancras in London to the elegantly industrial York. But no British hub has the civic force of Newcastle's main station, with its neoclassical facade and train shed comprising three arched spans. It could definitely use a little scrub-up, and like most British stations it desperately needs a better newsstand. But it's still a delight to see, recalling the glories of an earlier era of rail travel. |
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| Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images The former Victoria Terminus in the former Bombay was built in 1887 and is now the busiest station in India. It's certainly hectic, but the thrilling combination of Victorian Gothic and Mughal styles is a feat of imagination as much as engineering. VT, as some locals still call it, was the site of one of Mumbai's 2008 terror attacks. Much more happily, it was also the scene for the grand finale of Slumdog Millionaire. It has Unesco World Heritage Site designation. |
Source: New York's Grand Central – and nine other beautiful train stations
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