Station Hollands Spoor, the Hague, the Netherlands

A bit of an anachronism and a survivor, Den Haag Hollands Spoor is one the Hague’s two main train stations, which somehow never consolidated despite multiple proposals to eliminate either this station or Staatsspoor/Centraal from the 1920s through the 1960s. 

Private companies lead the first century of railroad development in the Netherlands, and the two Hague stations reflect the efforts of two competing companies—the Nederlandsche Rhijnspoorweg-Maatschappij built Staatsspoor (now Centraal) and the Hollandsche IJzeren Spoorweg-Maatschappij built Hollands Spoor, part of that company’s De Oude Lijn, which connected Amsterdam to Rotterdam via the Hague. In all other cities in the Netherlands, competing stations eventually disappeared as the government assumed greater control over the struggling private railway companies and merged their operations under Nederlandse Spoorwegen (a similar dynamic, fueled by corporate consolidation amongst the largest railway companies, is why the US has so many Union Stations). A handful of factors stymied consolidation in the Hague, including literal path dependency—Centraal is a terminal station, limiting its flexibility to connect cities via through-running—and so architect Dirk Margadant’s Neo-Renaissance style station building remains a key node in the Dutch railway system 125 years after its completion in 1894. 

So, what’s changed? Superficially, incredibly little, after a meticulous restoration over the last thirty-some years, but the disappearance of the chimneys and the new roof hint at big changes inside. Where the exterior has preserved the same look for more than a century, a modernist renovation in 1950 and a postmodernist one in the late 1980s completely remade the interior. Very little of Margadant’s original interior remains (which, it’s a major train station that needs to function as a modern transport hub—I’m personally totally okay with that). Obviously, NS also added a big illuminated Den Haag HS sign on top of the iron canopy.

Between Den Haag Centraal and Den Haag HS, this one actually came first—the initial station on this site, opened in 1843, was the first railroad station in the Hague. Well, sort of. At the time, this area was far enough outside of the Hague’s central core (...all of two kilometers, cities were small then) that it was basically in the countryside and actually part of the municipality of Rijswijk. 

The city of the Hague eventually grew up around Station Hollands Spoor, and both the city and the railway eventually outgrew the original station, so in the 1880s the HIJSM made plans to demolish and rebuild it. Company architect Dirk Antonie Nicolaas Margadant designed a new main building, royal waiting room, and train shed. The station building—a flamboyant bit of Dutch Neo-Renaissance made up of red brick, granite, and sandstone, with an ornamental iron canopy—was constructed from 1891 to 1894. With efficient railway operations his main consideration, Margadant designed his stations from the inside-out, prioritizing the internal layout and circulation rather than public-facing aspects like the facade. For Station Hollands Spoor, the architectural evaluation was mixed, with one critic describing it as a “laborious and incoherent whole”. 

As HIJSM’s in-house architect from the 1880s into the early 1900s, Margadant benefited from being in the right place at the right time—with the railway network expanding rapidly, he designed a bunch of stations for HIJSM across the Netherlands. Den Haag HS is the flashiest extant Margadant station, but a solid handful of others still stand, with Haarlem’s main station the highest profile. 

Although there was chatter about demolishing HS in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to create a single central station in the Hague—even in the 1940s, local media described the Hollands Spoor vs. Staatsspoor dynamic as “feeling ancient”—HS actually outlived its rival (...sort of). NS, the Dutch state railway company, weighed demolishing Den Haag Staatsspoor and expanding HS into a consolidated main station in the early 1960s (a recommendation also contained in the [otherwise awful] Jokinen Plan to ruin Amsterdam and the Hague with US-style highways). The lack of through-running tracks at Staatspoor/Centraal has been identified as a weakness for a very long time. However, with HS nestled into the dense Laakkwartier, there isn’t really room for more platforms here, so NS did demolish Staatspoor—but only to replace it with Den Haag Centraal next door in 1973. 

With its location on the line connecting Amsterdam to Rotterdam, by the late 1940s it was clear that the Hague needed a station at Hollands Spoor, and so after all that, the biggest threat to Margadant’s station came not from station consolidation, but a fire. During renovations in 1989, a burglar set the building on fire and the blaze burned the roof of the train shed. The building wasn’t a rijksmonument and had no conservation protection. Preservationists feared that restoring the damaged station would prove too costly and NS would choose to demolish and replace it. Instead, it was indeed rebuilt, restored, and designated a rijksmonument in 1991. Restoration work continues today—just this month, Ruland Architecten announced they’d be returning the train shed to its original Margadant palette. 

So how did the Hague end up with two main stations? Well, disjointed private railway development in the early decades of the network created two imperfect but seemingly irreplaceable stations—one well connected, but just a little too far from the center and a little too hemmed in to expand, and one near the center with space to expand, but stunted by its status as a terminal station with limited ability to connect cities to each other. It’s the smaller of the Hague’s two main stations today, but Den Haag HS remains a vital link in the Dutch railway system and a fun bit of 1890s architecture on Stationsplein. 

Further reading:

• This 2016 cultural-historical assessment from NS and ProRail is so so so informative
• The rijksmonument listing
• "Treinen naar de hofstad. Hoe komt Den Haag aan twee stations?" in Haagse Historie by Arjan den Boer
• "Ons Station" in Haagse Historie
• "Kathedraal der techniek"

Opinie | Met de stations van Margadant is iets bijzonders aan de hand Restaureer het Hollands Spoor

Door Wilfred van LeeuwenHet station Den Haag Hollands Spoor, waarvan in de nacht van 14 op 15 oktober een gedeelte van de kap en het grootste deel van de restauratie in de…

NRCGepubliceerd op 25 oktober 1989 Leestijd 4 minuten

Den Haag HS

Station Den Haag HS is onderdeel van

Spoorbeeld

The station makes an appearance in this ~1941 propaganda film by the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party, of Dutch volunteers heading to fight for the Nazis on the Eastern Front. More than 20,000 Dutch men actively volunteered to join the German military, mostly the Waffen-SS.