Centraal Station, Rotterdam (3)
part 3: track hall
The roof on the train tracks is mostly glass, but the high horizontal beams let only indirect light in. This makes a pleasently bright hall.
The dominant shape is the Y of the support struts. This shape is also repeated in the struts for the railings (barely visible in the lower left corner of this image, see also the overpass picture below).
The station is part of the Railteam european high speed train network, with direct connections to Antwerp and Amsterdam.
NS (nederlandse spoorwegen) is the main national railway company.
A variant of the Y-shape repeats upside-down in the hanging light fixtures.
The regular track display (left) shows the destination of the next train at that track.
An additional display (left) lists the next 7 departures from this track. Very useful, we should have this here in Switzerland, SBB!
In case of a problem, the track display shows that the train is not running (rijdt niet) — this could be made a bit more obvious (bold, big, other color)!
What’s nice is it also shows the reason (defecte bovenleiding = broken catenary), again something SBB should add!
Travelers access the platforms mainly via this very wide and spacious underpass, leading to the main hall and fietsenstalling.
Access to the underpass from the last platform while supporting the roof reqired an interesting double-Y shaped strut.
An alternative is the overpass at one end of the hall. It features an innovative solution for the catenary system: the upper catenary wire is mounted on isolators on both sides of the overpass above the bridge floor, dropping very close to the contact wire under the footbridge. This makes the overpass lower and thus allows a lower ceiling:
part 2 <-
