Darmstadt Hauptbahnhof is the main railway station in the German city Darmstadt. After Frankfurt Hbf and Wiesbaden Hbf, it is the third largest station in the state of Hesse. It is the second busiest station in Hesse after Frankfurt Hbf, with 35,000 passengers and 220 trains per day.Built in a late art nouveau style, the station was finished 1912 as one of the major works of architect Friedrich Pützer. The station replaced two separate and increasingly inadequate stations located at the Steubenplatz, around a km closer to the city centre in the east.HistoryThe predecessors of Darmstadt Hauptbahnhof were two separate stations in today’s Steubenplatz which were built by two railway companies in the 19th century when Darmstadt was connected to the rail network: the Main-Neckar station, a through station on the Frankfurt–Heidelberg line, opened in 1846, and the Ludwig station, a terminal station on the Mainz–Aschaffenburg railway, opened in 1858.The space at both stations became very cramped as a result of the increase in traffic at the end of the 19th century. Due to urban growth in Darmstadt, all space at the stations had been used, so that the necessary extensions of the old sites were not possible and the separation into two stations made operations difficult and road traffic on the level crossing of the Main-Neckar Railway over Rheinstraße created an obstruction to traffic.