36 The Main Railway Station

When people found out that coal burns well and sells even better, the first brown coal mines began to bite into the landscape around Teplice. The valuable commodity was taken to Ústí nad Labem and from there by river on to Saxony. Slow horse-drawn wagons, however, could not shuttle back and forth fast enough, and so a railway had to be built.

The first Teplice station was built on the site of former brickworks as early as 1858. It was the work of the Ústí–Teplice Railway company, the k.k. privilegierte Aussig-Teplitzer Eisenbahn, founded by Franz Stradal. In 1866 the line linking Teplice with Ústí nad Labem was extended to Duchcov, and later to Chomutov. The growing importance of the Teplice station soon made an extension necessary. This came in 1871, to plans by the architect Turba, who had already designed the original station building. The building was so large because it was also the headquarters of the company, including flats for its employees. In its day, the Neo-Romanesque Teplice station was considered the most beautiful in Austria-Hungary. To this day it is the building with the longest façade in the town – over 400 metres.

In 1871 its founder Stradal parted ways with the company and built a railway from Duchcov through Lesní brána to Podmokly near Děčín. Even so, the Aussig-Teplitzer Eisenbahn went on successfully expanding its network. The company opened the Trmice – Bílina line along the valley of the river of the same name in 1874, and a line across the České středohoří hills was laid in 1897. Its last line was the so-called Transversalbahn from Lovosice through Česká Lípa to Liberec, from 1900.

Until it was nationalized in 1924, the Ústí–Teplice Railway was the largest private railway company in northern Bohemia. Franz Stradal had the builder Hermann Rudolph put up a showpiece villa for him directly opposite the Teplice station. Today it serves the bus station.

Under socialism, the departure hall of the station was given new decoration, above all sandblasted pictures on glass. Those in the glazed arcade in front of the entrance, from the workshop of the academic painter Dagmar Boehmová, recall the legend of the discovery of the Teplice springs; the pictures inside the hall recall the myth of real socialism. Later, two larger-than-life statues of workers were added by the arcade.

For many years the station has been falling into disrepair. The people of Teplice saw the first steps of the planned reconstruction only in 2005, when the departure hall was refurbished and an underpass was built to the newly created platform. Even so, the present state of the building still does not match its importance.