Between 1869 and 1875 the Austrian Northwestern Railway Company (Österreichische Nordwestbahn – ÖNWB) built a railway line that ran from Vienna through Moravia and Bohemia to Děčín, where it connected to a line running from Dresden to Berlin. The Děčín border station, which opened on 15 October 1874, had a large rail yard with warehouses, train sheds, and repair shops, and it sat directly adjacent to the older station of the Bohemian North Railway Company (Böhmische Nordbahn – BNB). Together they now form a single station, Děčín–East, and the ÖNWB part of the station is referred to as the ‘lower’ station. Construction of the 120-metre-long station building began on 1 May 1873 based on a design created by Rudolf Frey (1846-1908), who that same year became the ÖNWB’s chief architect. Because the building was to be used not just for passenger arrivals and departures but also for customs clearance, it was designed to have a maximally open layout, with a large (28 × 20 m) elevated hall at its centre. Attached to the hall at the south end there is a tall vestibule that is accessed from a pair of staircases and was originally connected via a steel footbridge to the BNB building opposite, while on the side where the platforms are the hall was fitted with steel canopies, which have unfortunately since been destroyed. Inside the east wing of the building, wide, light-filled corridors lead along the southern façade to the passenger areas, which, as was the custom at the time, were divided according to fare levels: the first-class waiting room was closest to the hall, followed by the third-class restaurant, a cafeteria, and the large second-class restaurant and waiting area in the building’s north pavilion. The west wing housed the offices of the railway and customs administration, while employee flats were located on the first floor, and reached from a separate entrance through a courtyard with access balconies. The construction was done entirely by Viennese builders and craftsmen, but the company adhered to its rule of building with local materials, in this case, the grey Elbe sandstone that is used in the construction of most of the façades, which in the upper parts were coated with yellow plaster, and which were decorated with cement cartouches made by the company of sculptor Ludwig Strictius. While the first-class waiting room was given a gilded barrel vault with lunettes, the corridor and the restaurant hall had coffered ceilings, and there was a visible steel Polonceau roof trussing on the passenger hall. The hall’s rich stucco decorations are sculptural allegories from the workshop of Georg Schröffl: a female figure of the Danube and a male figure of the Elbe. The connection between these two European river basins, and thus between Austria-Hungary and the newly unified Germany, is symbolised in Frey’s architecture itself, which combines the Renaissance Revival style of the Vienna Ringstrasse with references to the Berlin Neoclassicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Since the Vienna station of the Northwestern Railway
