August 2018
On my first trip to Belgium, I originally planned to stay in Brussels and just do day trips around the country since every city was not even two hours from the capital. The problem was that hotels in Brussels near the main train station were very pricey. I suppose that was a side-effect of Brussels being the "capital of the EU" - lots of people went to Brussels on government business. That had me look further afield and I found a very cheap hotel right in front of Antwerp Station which happened to be served directly from the airport by train. I figured I would use Antwerp as one of my bases as I explored the country.
I am so happy I can still be surprised. I didn't research my Belgium trip too much other than hotels because I started to treasure "surprises" on my travels instead of knowing about every thing I would do and every sight I would see in advance. I didn't know anything about Antwerp other than it was a huge port city and was quite old. I arrived in Brussels, went into the airport station ticket office, and bought a ticket on the next train. They left frequently. Belgium was a very connected country! Brussels airport gets very high marks for ease of use and good connections onward.
The train ride was all of 30 minutes and I found myself arriving in Belgium's premier port city. I exited the platform into the station lobby pictured above. It really was a wth moment. How did I not know that Antwerp had one of the most beautiful train stations in Europe? It was literally a palace appended to the train station. I just stood there a few moments and took the place in. I exited through the front door onto a square. The hotel was directly in front of me. The station square was a slightly down and out place with Antwerp's Little Zoo entrance tucked away in one corner. It was definitely somewhere I would have to keep my wits about me. Not horribly so, but Brussel's Grand-Place it was not.
As for Antwerp Station's design:
The station is widely regarded as the finest example of railway architecture in Belgium, although the extraordinary eclecticism of the influences on Delacenserie's design had led to a difficulty in assigning it to a particular architectural style. In W. G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz an ability to appreciate the full range of the styles that might have influenced Delacenserie is used to illustrate the brilliance of the fictional architectural historian who is the novel's protagonist. Owing to the vast dome above the waiting room hall, the building became colloquially known as the spoorwegkathedraal ("railroad cathedral"). The originally iron and glass train hall (185 m long and 44 m high) was designed by Clément Van Bogaert, an engineer, and covers an area of 12,000 square m. The height of the station was necessary for dissipating the smoke of steam locomotives. The roof of the train hall was originally made of steel. In 2009, the American magazine Newsweek judged Antwerpen-Centraal the world's fourth greatest train station. In 2014, the British-American magazine Mashable awarded Antwerpen-Centraal the first place for the most beautiful railway station in the world.
(Wikipedia)
"In the world" is quite a statement, but one of the best I have seen anywhere, for sure! In a terrible turn of events, during World War II a V2 rocket squarely hit the station and caused extreme damage. Luckily, it was still structurally sound enough to rebuild. Since then the building has needed shoring up due to its age and the missile attack, but it has permanently become a part of Antwerp (and Belgium)'s architectural heritage. The station is like some railway empress dowager who still reigns over her country's pathways of iron.
I returned to Antwerp again by chance on a cheap ticket to Brussels before one of my trips to the Netherlands. One of the things I looked forward to was passing through that "railroad cathedral" one more time on my way to Rotterdam.
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