Feldkirch railway station is situated in Bahnhofplatz, in the northern Feldkirch district of Levis, between the Ardetzenberg and the Känzele.
History
The station was opened on 1 July 1872, together with the rest of the Vorarlberg railway.[2] The original station building was repeatedly extended from 1884, as the Arlberg railway transformed Feldkirch into an international transport hub.
In the 1960s, the original station building was torn down. In early 1969, the new building was put into operation.
Between 1999 and 2001, the station was renovated and rebuilt again, as part of the ÖBB-Bahnhofsinitiative. The renovation work included replacement of the platforms, the pedestrian underpass and the station building.
In 2010, in a survey conducted by the Verkehrsclub Österreich (VCÖ), the station was nominated by the interviewed passengers as the sixth most beautiful railway station in Austria.[3]
Services
Feldkirch is one of Vorarlberg's major railway stations. It also serves as a loading station for the motorail train from Feldkirch to Vienna, Graz and Villach. Additionally, it is served by Railjet and other long-distance trains as well as regional train services of Vorarlberg S-Bahn, with some services also operating for Bodensee S-Bahn.
As of the December 2024 timetable change,[update] the following regional train services exist (the S1 and R5 are both also part of Bodensee S-Bahn):[4]
Feldkirch station is, for customs purposes, a border station for passengers arriving from Liechtenstein and Switzerland. As such, checks may be performed in the station by Austrian customs officials. Systematic passport controls were reduced when Switzerland joined the Schengen Area in 2008 and later scrapped when Liechtenstein joined in 2011.[9][10][11]
Notable visitors
James Joyce
Irish writer James Joyce paid a visit to Feldkirch in 1932 to see his friend Eugene Jolas. During the visit, he said to Jolas, "Over there, on those tracks, the fate of Ulysses was decided in 1915." Since Bloomsday 1994, the quote has been displayed in German translation in the station concourse.
James Joyce quote display in the Feldkirch station concourse.
Joyce had travelled through Feldkirch by train in 1915. Due to World War I, he had been considered an "enemy alien" in his then home town of Trieste, which, at that time, was part of Austria-Hungary. Thanks to influential friends, he had obtained permission to leave Austria-Hungary, with his partner Nora Barnacle and their two shared children, and travel to Zürich. Meanwhile, his brother Stanislaus Joyce was arrested in Trieste and detained until the end of the war.[12]
During border control checks at Feldkirch, the train on which Joyce and Barnacle were travelling was boarded, and passengers inspected by officials; Joyce escaped arrest by a whisker. If Joyce had been arrested then, he would have been unable to write Ulysses in its present form, hence his comment to Jolas.[13]
At the end of 2001, the ÖBB replaced a plaque mounted by the Feldkirch culture circle above the ticket counters on Bloomsday 1994 with a more conspicuous presentation of the Joycean literary quotation.
Upon returning to Austria via the border station at Feldkirch an unforgettable experience stood before me. Even getting out I had noticed a strange unrest in the border guards and policemen. A bell tolled to signal the approach of a train. The policemen stood, all railway officials rushed out of their boxes. Slowly, majestically, the train rolled in, a special kind of train, a Salon train. The locomotive stopped. A motion was palpable through the ranks of those waiting, I still did not know why. Then I saw behind the mirror glass of the coach an erect Emperor Karl, the last Emperor of Austria and his black-clad wife, Empress Zita. I was startled: the last Emperor of Austria, heir to the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled the country for seven hundred years, was leaving his kingdom! As he had refused formally to abdicate, the republic had forced his departure. Now the high serious man stood at the window and saw for the last time the mountains, the houses, the people of his country. ...[explanatory note 1]
^The truth of this anecdote has since been questioned by biographers of Stefan Zweig: "Zweig asserts in The World of Yesterday that on 24 March 1919 he was an eyewitness in Feldkirch to the historically gratifying moment when Karl and Zita of Habsburg were deported from the Republic of Austria to Switzerland. However, Zweig biographers mistrust this now famous eyewitness account, because neither Zweig, nor his then girlfriend and later wife Friderike Winternitz, who was accompanying him, had ever mentioned or recorded the inherent sensation anywhere before.
Zweig first mentioned his story, often since quoted as an historical eyewitness account, in The World of Yesterday, written decades later. Friderike Winternitz, also active as a journalist and writer, similarly first mentioned the legendary anecdote even later than the "Second World War", in her Zweig biography, after learning, in Zweig's "World of Yesterday", of what both of them had (supposedly) seen in Feldkirch. Weigel, Andreas. "Am James Joyce und Stefan Zweig (Rohbericht)". James James-Joyce-Austriaca · James Joyce und Österreich (in German). Yahoo Deutschland Groups. Archived from the original on 5 January 2013. Retrieved 11 August 2011.
References
^"Feldkirch" (in German). Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB). Retrieved 20 September 2024.
Beer, Lothar (1994). Die Geschichte der Bahnen in Vorarlberg [The History of the Railways in Vorarlberg] (in German). Vol. 1. Hard, Austria: Hecht-Verlag. ISBN3-85298-001-1.
Beer, Lothar (1995). Die Geschichte der Bahnen in Vorarlberg [The History of the Railways in Vorarlberg] (in German). Vol. 2. Hard, Austria: Hecht-Verlag. ISBN3-85298-015-1.
Fröwis, Franz J. (1981). "Drei Sonderzüge von historischer Bedeutung in Vorarlberg (1917, 1919 und 1921)". Bludenzer Geschichtsblätter (in German). 40/41: 3-43 (Der "Hofsonderzug" vom 24. März 1919), S.23-30 (Über die Abschiebung der Habsburger via Feldkirch in die Schweiz.).
