Feldkirch railway station

Feldkirch railway station (German: Bahnhof Feldkirch) serves the city of Feldkirch, in the Feldkirch district of the Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg. Opened in 1872, it forms the junction between the Vorarlberg railway and the Feldkirch–Buchs railway.

Feldkirch
View of the station and the site of the former wagon workshop.
LocationBahnhofstraße
6800 Feldkirch
Austria
Coordinates47°14′28″N 09°36′15″E
Elevation457 m (AA)
Owned byAustrian Federal Railways (ÖBB)
Operated byÖBB
Line(s)Feldkirch–Buchs railway
Vorarlberg railway
Distance46.912 km (29.150 mi)
from St. Margrethen
History
Opened1 July 1872 (1872-07-01)
Location
Feldkirch
Location within Austria

The station is owned and operated by the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB).

Location

Feldkirch railway station is situated in Bahnhofplatz, in the northern Feldkirch district of Levis, between the Ardetzenberg and the Känzele.

History

The station was opened on 1 July 1872, together with the rest of the Vorarlberg railway.[1] The original station building was repeatedly extended from 1884, as the Arlberg railway transformed Feldkirch into an international transport hub.

In the 1960s, the original station building was torn down. In early 1969, the new building was put into operation.

Between 1999 and 2001, the station was renovated and rebuilt again, as part of the ÖBB-Bahnhofsinitiative. The renovation work included replacement of the platforms, the pedestrian underpass and the station building.

In 2010, in a survey conducted by the Verkehrsclub Österreich (VCÖ), the station was nominated by the interviewed passengers as the sixth most beautiful railway station in Austria.[2]

Services

Feldkirch is one of Vorarlberg's major railway stations. It also serves as a loading station for the motorail train from Feldkirch to Vienna, Graz and Villach. Additionally, Feldkirch is the border station of the line to Buchs; it is the only Austrian border station adjacent to the Principality of Liechtenstein.

Notable visitors

James Joyce

Irish writer James Joyce paid a visit to Feldkirch in 1932 to see his friend Eugene Jolas. During the visit, he said to Jolas, "Over there, on those tracks, the fate of Ulysses was decided in 1915." Since Bloomsday 1994, the quote has been displayed in German translation in the station concourse.

James Joyce quote display in the Feldkirch station concourse.

Joyce had travelled through Feldkirch by train in 1915. Due to World War I, he had been considered an "enemy alien" in his then home town of Trieste, which, at that time, was part of Austria-Hungary. Thanks to influential friends, he had obtained permission to leave Austria-Hungary, with his partner Nora Barnacle and their two shared children, and travel to Zürich. Meanwhile, his brother Stanislaus Joyce was arrested in Trieste and detained until the end of the war.[3]

During border control checks at Feldkirch, the train on which Joyce and Barnacle were travelling was boarded, and passengers inspected by officials; Joyce escaped arrest by a whisker. If Joyce had been arrested then, he would have been unable to write Ulysses in its present form, hence his comment to Jolas.[4]

At the end of 2001, the ÖBB replaced a plaque mounted by the Feldkirch culture circle above the ticket counters on Bloomsday 1994 with a more conspicuous presentation of the Joycean literary quotation.

Stefan Zweig

In his memoirs The World of Yesterday (German: Die Welt von Gestern), the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig explained that on 24 March 1919 he had been an eyewitness at Feldkirch railway station, as Charles I of Austria was deported from the Republic of German Austria into exile in Switzerland:[5]

Upon returning to Austria via the border station at Feldkirch an unforgettable experience stood before me. Even getting out I had noticed a strange unrest in the border guards and policemen. A bell tolled to signal the approach of a train. The policemen stood, all railway officials rushed out of their boxes. Slowly, majestically, the train rolled in, a special kind of train, a Salon train. The locomotive stopped. A motion was palpable through the ranks of those waiting, I still did not know why. Then I saw behind the mirror glass of the coach an erect Emperor Karl, the last Emperor of Austria and his black-clad wife, Empress Zita. I was startled: the last Emperor of Austria, heir to the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled the country for seven hundred years, was leaving his kingdom! As he had refused formally to abdicate, the republic had forced his departure. Now the high serious man stood at the window and saw for the last time the mountains, the houses, the people of his country. ...[explanatory note 1]

— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag AB, 1942

See also

References

Notes
  1. Ritsch, Wolfgang; Stadelmann, Carmel (April 2005). "Vision Rheintal: Eine Raumbezogene Kulturgeschichte" (PDF). Vision-Rheintal website (in German). Retrieved 13 August 2011. External link in |work= (help)
  2. "Dornbirn hat schönsten Bahnhof Vorarlbergs" [Dornbirn has the most beautiful station in Vorarlberg]. Vorarlberg ORF website (in German). ORF. 25 August 2010. Archived from the original on 22 July 2012. Retrieved 13 August 2011. External link in |work= (help)
  3. Weigel, Andreas (2 February 2007). "Feldkirch und das Schicksal. Zum 125. Geburtstag von James Joyce (1882–1941)". St. Galler Tagblatt (in German).
  4. Weigel, Andreas (2000). "Das Schicksal des "Ulysses". James Joyce und Feldkirch, Vorarlberg". Montfort. Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Geschichte und Gegenwart Vorarlbergs (in German). 52 (3): 289–301.
  5. Ulrich Nachbaur (March 2009). "Am Grenzbahnhof Feldkirch 1919: Visum für Stefan Zweig, 4. Jänner 1919". Geschichte - Landesgeschichte (in German). Land Vorarlberg. Archived from the original on 28 September 2011. Retrieved 11 August 2011. External link in |publisher= (help)

Explanatory note
  1. The truth of this anecdote has since been questioned by biographers of Stefan Zweig: "Zweig asserts in The World of Yesterday that on 24 March 1919 he was an eyewitness in Feldkirch to the historically gratifying moment when Karl and Zita of Habsburg were deported from the Republic of Austria to Switzerland. However, Zweig biographers mistrust this now famous eyewitness account, because neither Zweig, nor his then girlfriend and later wife Friderike Winternitz, who was accompanying him, had ever mentioned or recorded the inherent sensation anywhere before. Zweig first mentioned his story, often since quoted as an historical eyewitness account, in The World of Yesterday, written decades later. Friderike Winternitz, also active as a journalist and writer, similarly first mentioned the legendary anecdote even later than the "Second World War", in her Zweig biography, after learning, in Zweig's "World of Yesterday", of what both of them had (supposedly) seen in Feldkirch. Weigel, Andreas. "Am James Joyce und Stefan Zweig (Rohbericht)". James James-Joyce-Austriaca · James Joyce und Österreich (in German). Yahoo Deutschland Groups. Retrieved 11 August 2011.

Further reading
  • Beer, Lothar (1994). Die Geschichte der Bahnen in Vorarlberg [The History of the Railways in Vorarlberg] (in German). 1. Hard, Austria: Hecht-Verlag. ISBN 3-85298-001-1.
  • Beer, Lothar (1995). Die Geschichte der Bahnen in Vorarlberg [The History of the Railways in Vorarlberg] (in German). 2. Hard, Austria: Hecht-Verlag. ISBN 3-85298-015-1.
  • Fröwis, Franz J. (1981). "Drei Sonderzüge von historischer Bedeutung in Vorarlberg (1917, 1919 und 1921)". Bludenzer Geschichtsblätter (in German). 40/41: 3-43 (Der "Hofsonderzug" vom 24. März 1919), S.23-30 (Über die Abschiebung der Habsburger via Feldkirch in die Schweiz.).

This article is based upon a translation of the German language version as at August 2011.

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