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Warsaw’s Central Railway Station: 40 and going strong

PR dla Zagranicy
Roberto Galea 08.12.2015 16:19
  • Warsaw’s Central Railway Station: 40 and going strong
There's a cult Polish 1970s television series about a man at a sensitive time of life, working as a building construction engineer at Warsaw's major investments of the time, one of them being Centralny (Central) train station.
Photo: Wikimedia CommonsPhoto: Wikimedia Commons

A flagship investment of the 1970s and one of the symbols of the fairly affluent time when Edward Gierek was leader of the Polish United Worker's Party. It was built with record speed – in 1,100 days – to open in time for the Party's seventh congress and a visit by Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Ultra-modern for its epoch – it had for instance Poland's only sliding glass doors. Centralny's architects were Arseniusz Romanowicz, who had been involved with railroad design since before WW2, and Piotr Szymaniak.

Apart from the sliding glass doors (which themselves played in a popular 1970s crime series), the building had four levels, a self-service snack bar that had a conveyor belt as a feature, escalators, outside terraces, and a VIP lounge.

Elżbieta Krajewska has more.

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