Stuttgart Schwabstraße Station
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Schwabstraße station is a subterranean railway station in
Stuttgart Stuttgart (; ; Swabian German, Swabian: ; Alemannic German, Alemannic: ; Italian language, Italian: ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, largest city of the States of Germany, German state of ...
,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
. It is located west of the city centre in the district of Stuttgart-West, along ''Rotebühlstraße'' at the intersection with ''Schwabstraße''. The station originally formed the terminus of the first section of the Connection line (), the original underground section of the
Stuttgart S-Bahn The Stuttgart S-Bahn is a suburban railway system (S-Bahn) serving the Stuttgart Region, an urban agglomeration of around 2.7 million people, consisting of the city of Stuttgart and the adjacent districts of Esslingen, Böblingen, Ludwigsb ...
. Several lines of the S-Bahn terminate at the station. It is notable for a 1.5 km long loop at the end of the station to allow S-Bahn trains to turn around.


History

Schwabstraße station was built in the course of the construction of the Stuttgart S-Bahn in the mid-1970s. The station was built using excavation from the surface and mining techniques for the terminal loop. Its construction proved to be very difficult. The shell was completed in December 1977 and in 1978 the first section of the Connection line began operating to Schwabstraße. In 1985, the line was extended to the southwest to Stuttgart University station at the
University of Stuttgart The University of Stuttgart () is a research university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized into 10 faculties. It is one of the oldest technical universities in Germany with programs in civil, mechanical, ind ...
.


Station

The station is between 11 and 27 m below the street surface, lying 6 to 8 metres below the
water table The water table is the upper surface of the phreatic zone or zone of saturation. The zone of saturation is where the pores and fractures of the ground are saturated with groundwater, which may be fresh, saline, or brackish, depending on the loc ...
. It has a gradient of 1.6 per thousand. The station has an island platform with two platform edges. Platform track 1 serves trains towards University station and trains terminating at Schwabstraße. Track 2 serves trains running towards
Stuttgart Central station Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof (; ) is the primary railway station in the city of Stuttgart, the state capital of Baden-Württemberg, in southwestern Germany. It is the largest regional and long-distance railway station in Stuttgart, the main node of the ...
. Accesses to the platforms are at either end of the platform. At the western end of the platform the tracks to the turning loop separate from the through tracks towards Universität.


Terminal loop

The station has an unusual operational feature, a
turning loop A balloon loop, turning loop, or reversing loop (Glossary of North American railway terms, North American Terminology) allows a rail vehicle or train to reverse direction without having to Shunting (rail), shunt or stop. Balloon loops can be u ...
. It runs completely underground and contains a siding for a full train. The depth of the ground covering the tunnel ranges from 17 m near the platforms to 80 m at its western end near the former
Stuttgart West station Stuttgart (; ; Swabian German, Swabian: ; Alemannic German, Alemannic: ; Italian language, Italian: ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, largest city of the States of Germany, German state of ...
. Given the number of trains using the line, a return loop was found to have a higher economic return than simple terminating tracks despite the higher construction costs.Jürgen Wedler, Karl-Heinz Böttcher: ''Der Tunnel. Verbindungsbahn der S-Bahn Stuttgart. Dokumentation ihrer Entstehung''. Herausgegeben von der Bundesbahndirektion Stuttgart. Kohlhammer-Verlag, Stuttgart 1985, , p. 19-20. Excavation of the loop began on 7 October 1974 and the construction of the junction structures and the first 60 m sections of the two single-track tunnel tubes of the Hasenberg Tunnels towards the
Stuttgart–Horb railway The Stuttgart–Horb railway is a 67.227 kilometer-long railway in the southern part of the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, running from Stuttgart to Horb. It forms part of a railway known as the Gäubahn () or Gäu Railway. The Royal Wà ...
. The actual connection to the Stuttgart–Horb railway was built in 1979 and went into operation in 1985. The front of the terminal loop is in leached Gipskeuper rock. Because this is fragile and the depth of rock is low, the rock above the tunnel roof was made stable by freezing it. There was a geological problem as the back of the terminal loop was situated in Gipskeuper layers containing
anhydrite Anhydrite, or anhydrous calcium sulfate, is a mineral with the chemical formula CaSO4. It is in the orthorhombic crystal system, with three directions of perfect cleavage parallel to the three planes of symmetry. It is not isomorphous with the ...
, which swell strongly when in contact with water, which is inevitable in a tunnel, and create strong forces on the sides of the tunnel. Accordingly, the inner shell of the tunnel is up to 1 m thick. The tunnel section has an inner diameter of 6.70 m on single-track sections and 9.80 m on two-track sections. The radius of the loop is 190 m and its length is 1,500 m.


Operations

The station's abbreviation is TSS. The station is in the fare zone of the
Verkehrs- und Tarifverbund Stuttgart The ''Verkehrs- und Tarifverbund Stuttgart GmbH'' (VVS; ) is a List of German transport associations, transport association that coordinates the local public transport in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, as well as in the neighbouri ...
(transport and tariff association of Stuttgart). The station is classified by
Deutsche Bahn (, ; abbreviated as DB or DB AG ) is the national railway company of Germany, and a state-owned enterprise under the control of the German government. Headquartered in the Bahntower in Berlin, it is a joint-stock company ( AG). DB was fou ...
as a category 3 station.


S-Bahn


References


External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Stuttgart Schwabstrasse Station Schwabstrasse Railway stations in Germany opened in 1978 Schwabstrasse