1919: Old goods station is shut down
The carter's pub stood opposite. The loading ramp is still there. But nothing is loaded there anymore. A narrow courtyard with a wide driveway separates it from Marienstraße. Close to its junction with Sprendlinger Landstraße, the hall, which is now home to a mosque, nestles with its ramp crouched against the towering railroad embankment. For a long time, a sign at the entrance indicated that this was a Deutsche Bahn facility. However, it has long since ceased to have any use for it.
The courtyard is used as a parking lot. Every now and then a cat shuffles across the pavement. The old hall with the ramp is the last reminder of Offenbach's first goods station. It was built in 1873 when the Frankfurt-Bebra line connected the city of Offenbach to the German rail network. As a Christmas present, so to speak, the city received a main station on December 15 and a goods station to the west of it.
When this freight station was closed 90 years ago, it had been handling the growing volume of goods of an expanding industrial city for 46 years. A newspaper article from 1919, the year it was closed, speaks of 300 to 400 wagonloads that were delivered and unloaded there every day. There is talk of "daily values in the millions".
The goods station had the advantage of a central location. And the wagon drivers enjoyed being able to boost the turnover of a restaurant every day just across the road. On the other hand, the cramped space on what was then Moltkestrasse and is now Marienstrasse had long since ceased to be sufficient for the increasing volume of traffic. The new goods station on Grenzstrasse, which opened in 1919, offered far more space and mobility.
However, this did not make every Offenbach user happy. Smaller tradespeople in particular, who used their own handcart rather than a freight forwarder, complained 90 years ago that they now had to travel a long way to the railroad tracks. The Offenbacher Zeitung newspaper therefore suggested setting up "goods collection points" within the city limits.
For smaller businesses, the newspaper calculated, "the relocation of goods handling to the far east of the city will be a costly innovation. If you imagine that a small tradesman wants to have a consignment transported from the lower Ludwigstrasse to the new goods station or vice versa by one of his employees, it will take almost three hours to get there and back.
Of course, the decentralized collection points never materialized, and in the meantime the new goods station from 1919 has become as insignificant as its predecessor on Marienstraße. Its tracks were initially only retained as an alternative during the planned elevation of the track bed. Although this was delayed by the First World War, the old goods station was no longer needed when a train passed through Offenbach on the elevated tracks for the first time on August 11, 1925. It was now located deep below the tracks.
For Offenbach, the elevation of the tracks was a blessing. Until then, the railroad barriers, which were closed at short intervals, had separated the south of the city from the center. The elevation was a stroke of liberation. However, it put the old goods station into a deep sleep. What was not immediately demolished is still sleeping.
By Lothar R. Braun
Published in the OFFENBACH POST (opens in a new tab)