Johannesburg Park Station is the city’s main railway hub and is recognised as the largest in the whole of Africa.
Established as Park Halt in 1897, the station has undergone several transformations since, including during South Africa‘s emergence as the world’s gold capital.
The station takes its name from a spot on an earlier railway line from Boksburg to Braamfontein called Park, after Krugers Park nearby.
Park Station’s 1897 building was built in Rotterdam and featured cast iron pillars, a glass dome roof and a restaurant with carved oak panels.
As passenger numbers grew, architect, Gordon Leith, was tasked with redesigning the station in the late 1920s. A new concourse opened in 1932, with the expanded station’s eight platforms going on to handle some 16 million passengers annually.
There were further developments in the early 1950s, with platforms lowered, concourses built above them and new tracks added.
In 1964, the station was targeted in a deadly protest against apartheid. John Harris from the African Resistance Movement placed a bomb on a whites only platform at Park Station.
One person died and a number of others were injured in the explosion. Harris was later sentenced to death.
During the years of South Africa’s apartheid policy the station was recognised as a symbol of a divided Johennesburg.
Former president Nelson Mandela described the hub as dividing the capital in two, with a “river of steel” railway lines and “unfriendly” buildings cutting through the city.
The Blue Room, a whites only restaurant at the station, served as a social hub where white gloved waiters would serve guests beneath marble columns, according to Paul Duncan and Alain Proust’s Hidden Johannesburg.
Remnants of the station’s original glass structure can be seen on the edge of Johannesburg’s Newtown, near the Nelson Mandela Bridge.
Park Station today forms the heart of the Witwatersrand Metrorail network, with daily services to Carletonville, Randfontein and Soweta in the west and east to Springs, Nigel and Daveyton. Northwards lies Pretoria, while Vereeniging sits is in the south.,
Next to the existing mainline station is the terminus of South Africa’s Gautrain high speed link to Pretoria and OR Tambo Airport.
The terminus, which opened in 2012, is underground and connected to Marlboro station via nine miles of tunnels.
