Once upon a time, many years ago .... it did happen. One of the big concerns with the "10 car scheme" replacing 8 car trains with 10 car ones to places like Dartford and Sevenoaks was that it wasn't adding 25% capacity because the country end of the train was always much quieter. And, yes, there were those of us who used to travel in the back of the train in the morning and the front in the evening, and wish that 10 car trains ran into Holborn Viaduct toot for some reason they never did.
Fascinating. The large rail terminus has never really been built for everyday journeys. London Waterloo is probably the one which handles everyday best. Germany has replaced many of it's termini, largely to benefit through running I guess, but with the added bonus of better crowd control.
The only termini in Germany which I can think of which have been replaced by through stations are Stuttgart (still being built) and the deep level lines - essentially the north-south routes - at the Berlin Hbf. Leipzig Hbf has had an S-Bahn tunnel dug underneath it but remains a terminus for main line trains and München Hbf is still a terminus and is likely to remain so, its S-Bahn tunnel having been built some 50 years ago. Frankfurt-am-Main is still a terminus.
The Hauptbahnhöfe in other cities: Hamburg; Köln; Hannover; Essen; Dresden; and so on are through stations and have been since time immemorial, so to speak!
Heidelberg and Braunschweig were two examples I had in mind.
Hmmm! I'm not sure they are particularly good examples. Planning for the replacement of both these terminal stations started in the 19th Century and work started in the 20th, in the case of Heidelberg in 1902. Both were held up by two wars and a lack of money between them. Heidelberg finally opening in 1955 and Braunschweig in 1960.
As eightf48544 pointed out
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?action=profile;u=228 Kassel was also rebuilt. But this was because the division of Germany had shifted the traffic flows from bring, at least in part, radial flows to Berlin to being largely North-South. The
Neubaustrecke Hannover-Würzburg largely built in the 1980s used the rebuilt Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe to avoid time loss in reversing at the Hauptbahnhof.
So we have a total of four termini (five if we include Kassel), which is hardly 'many', and these were rebuilt over a period of a hundred years or so. In all cases it was to improve train running and in the cases of Heidelberg and Braunschweig one of the main driving forces was the desire to remove road level crossings at the throat of the stations which even in the days of horse-drawn traffic were a
PITA▸ .
It doesn't look as if crowd control was in the minds of the architects at all - apart from trying to make the stations pleasant places to be in.
Edited: Forgot the NBS Hannover-Würzburg in my original post! Doh!
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