The Austrian State Railway Company (StEG) was founded in 1854 by a financial consortium headed by Isaac Pereire, a Parisian banker, that sought to purchase all the railway lines that had been built and operated to that time from the Austrian state and then to gradually expand them. The end of the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 meant that the company was able to bid on the construction of a new cross-border railway link. Granted a concession in 1872, it began to build a railway line from Choceň to Meziměstí, designed under the direction of the eminent railway engineer Auguste de Serres-Wieczffinsky (1841–1900), head of construction at StEG. In 1877 the line was linked to the Prussian railway network, from where it led to the coal mines in what was then Waldenburg and is today Wałbrzych in Poland. The nearly two-kilometre railway yard at the border station in Meziměstí is still in its original shape of a triangle, inside of which the Prussian railway’s repair workshops were built. The company’s design office, headed at the time by engineer Karl Engler, made consistent use of the standard designs for all the types of structures, except in the case of the spaciously designed passenger building in Meziměstí because it served as the customs clearance area for passengers as well – and it also no doubt played the role of representing the state as a whole. Construction took place between June 1876 and August 1877. The elongated single-storey station building is formed of two halls containing the first- and second-class waiting rooms and restaurants, joined at the centre by a two-storey section, and accessed from the building’s street side through an eighty-metre-long glazed veranda that at its eastern end connects to a tall, spacious pavilion that served as the entrance hall with the ticket counters – the same structure was originally meant to stand at the western end as well. This unusual architectural design was likely created by architect Johann Oehm (1836–1905), who had already worked under Serres’ direction in 1873 on the design for the company’s largest station, which was built in Budapest (today’s West Station), where similar pavilions were used for the entrance hall and restaurant. A similar entrance hall, featuring a mansard roof with circular dormers, was designed by Oehm in 1901 as part of the extension of Brno Central Station done in 1903–1904. Meziměstí never, however, experienced the level of international traffic expected and in 1939 customs operations ceased here. In 1947 the second-class waiting room was turned into a theatre hall, and a famous local amateur theatre group still performs here. Since 2008 it has also been possible on request to visit a small private museum exhibition that is accessed directly from the hall.
