Cheb became an important railway crossroads as early as 1865, when the Bavarian railway lines from Regensburg and Hof and the Saxon line from Leipzig began running here, and the two companies built a joint station, to which domestic railway companies also extended their lines from Prague and Pilsen in 1870 and 1872. In 1895, new warehouses and a multi-stall locomotive shed were built here, which today are the only reminders of the station’s original appearance – it was destroyed in an Allied air raid on 8 and 12 April 1945, along with two adjacent city blocks. The new station building, combined with the bus terminal, thus acquired a generous forecourt area, whose main axis in the direction of the city determined the basic symmetrical arrangement of a new group of buildings: a passenger hall built parallel to the railway track and an eight-storey service building on conical columns built crosswise above the passenger hall. Where the two buildings intersect is where the entrance to the passenger hall and the underpass to the platforms is located and is also a point that divides the station into two parts: the section on the left contains the ticket offices of the railway and the bus services and the exit to the bus platform; the section on the right contains the waiting rooms, a cafeteria, a restaurant, and a café on the first floor. In the front part of the passenger hall there also used to be a special lounge for foreign passengers, for whom the nearest platform with a row of trees was reserved, adjacent to which was the customs office – this station was also the main Czechoslovak inland border station and in fact the first station inside the Eastern Bloc. The architect Josef Danda (1906–1999) was appointed as the station’s chief designer in 1956 by the State Institute of Transport Planning at the Ministry of Transport. Dander had already established his reputation as a leading specialist in this area through his work designing the stations in Pardubice and Klatovy. His decision ‘to give the exterior and interior architecture an optimistic air, with a certain monumentality to the exterior and a friendly, cheerful atmosphere in the interior’ also determined the careful choice of materials. While the building’s shell features dark red and white ceramic tiles combined with grey stone, the interior was dominated by glass, polished steel, and aluminium, and by synthetic materials fashionable at the time as well: tiles made of formica-laminate and, above all, a ceiling made out of PVC boards in three colours. Coloured laminate was also used on the exterior for the (just partly preserved) roofing of the colonnade around the entire forecourt that connected the main building to the post office that closes off the area at the south end and to the office building and health centre at the north end. The original tubular structures of the peron shelters have not survived. The interior decorations emerged out of a national competition that was organised by the Czech Fine Arts Fund in 1960: the stained glass in the window of the main façade was designed by Zdeněk Holub, the two mosaics on the sides of the hall featuring visual themes of outer space were created by Jaroslav Moravec, the technically unique walls of hand-shaped glass were created by Benjamin Hejlek and Jan Štibych, and Hugo Demartini created the metal sculpture next to the international waiting room. The building was officially opened on 22 December 1962. At the end of 2016, the passenger building was added to the country’s protected heritage list.
