Stuttgart’s ever-receding station is Germany’s latest transport fiasco

TRAVELLERS ARRIVING at or leaving from Stuttgart’s main railway station should be warned. They must allow an extra 10-15 minutes to get out of the building or get to the platforms to catch a train, because of an ugly maze of detours around Germany’s biggest construction site. “It has been like this since I was at school 13 years ago,” shrugs the barista at a nearby coffee shop.The ambitious plan for a new station in the capital of Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s most prosperous states and home to Daimler-Benz, Bosch and Porsche, was to be an advertisement for the state’s engineering prowess. By relocating tracks and platforms largely underground, it was supposed to speed up journeys to other places in Germany and all over Europe, while reclaiming space for shops, housing and parkland in the centre of town. The city picked a design by Christoph Ingenhoven, a cool modernist architect from Düsseldorf, and the late Frei Otto, winner of the prestigious Pritzker prize for architecture.