It's from a stash of German engineering drawings of trainshed roofs (you know -- this sort of thing):
The Germans were clearly keen to document British practice, and here's a drawing of St Pancras:
They then went into devilish detail about their own structures -- here a cross-section through the platform canopies at Sonnerberg:
While at this point my less-than-rudimentary German lets me down and, while I am clear about what it is, I have no idea where it is:
Still, intriguing, no?
Well I like them, anyway.
3 comments:
I think this might be Sonneberg in Thuringia. It's about 20km from Coburg in Bavaria (as in Saxe-Coburg). The line joining the two cities is said to be one of the oldest in Germany around 1855.
The captions translate "Single-column [or, stem] platform roof[s], Sonneberg Station"
Doubt that a translation in the net will leave doubts about the location ;-) but anyway: the last picture is nowhere; it is just an illustration of best practices acting as an example.
A single line between two platforms is not often to be found; normal situation as elsewhere would be platforms left and right of the up and down line (in english railway terms). Island platforms would be more commonly used for commuter lines (e.g. Berlin S-Bahn).
The disposition of platforms varied considerably in England, and there are examples of a single line served by two platform faces (the M&GN, to take one company, had two: one at Sutton Bridge, and one at South Lynn).
I'm pretty sure the Underground also had some but my memory is currently refusing to cooperate.
Similarly, the Great Central Railway built almost all of its through-stations with a single, double-faced island platform, accessed by overly-wide bridges over the running lines. The reason for this was that, while it was built as a twin-track, the intention was to expand it to a four-track railway, and it would have been much easier to lay the additional tracks outside the island rather than to have to rebuild every station on the route to accommodate them (and hence the bridges being built over-wide to start off with). In fact, the GCR never achieved sufficient traffic to warrant the extra tracks.
The M&GN also went in for island platforms at its main stations: Melton Constable, the main junction in the eastern part of the system, was an island, as was South Lynn (the main loco changeover point between west and east parts of the system), and Sutton Bridge, the main junction in the west; as indeed was Bourne, the main "changeover" point between M&GN and MR. Most of the others were more "traditional", with platforms either side of the running lines.
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