Shanghai Railway Station: 28 December 1987

Basic information

The night of the handover

Late at night on 28 December 1987, at the old North Station.

At 11.30 in the evening the last train, bound for Ningbo, pulled out. The waiting room, usually loud with people, was suddenly empty. Then the three big characters "Shanghai Station" on the roof of the station building were taken down.

That same night, not far to the west, the "new station" lit up and opened.

The signboard "Shanghai Station" had changed places for good.

This was no ordinary station move. For Zhabei it was a handover of the "north gate": the old North Station had spent nearly eighty years linking Shanghai with the rest of the country; from this night the baton passed to the brand-new station to its west, one able to "see off 250,000 people a day".

The old North Station's last days

Why move? One set of figures shows how hard-pressed the old North Station was:

• its largest waiting room was less than 400 m²;
• yet 50,000 passengers boarded trains there every day;
• at peak times five passengers stood in every two square metres on average.

In the Spring Festival rush the old North Station once set a record of nearly 150,000 people carried in a day. Put that figure inside an eighty-year-old station and it comes to four words: it could hold no more.

(The old North Station's own story — completed in 1909, destroyed in war, rebuilt, and today the Shanghai Railway Museum — is told in Part Three.)

Why a new station had to be built

The turning point came after reform and opening up.

In March 1981 a preparatory report was submitted to the State Council: on the site of the former Shanghai East Station, build a new Shanghai station with a 20,000 m² main building, a 37,000 m² square, and a daily capacity of 72 arrivals and departures. On 19 June that year the State Council approved the plan.

In 1984 ground was broken for the new station. The designers were the team led by Wei Zhida of the East China Architectural Design Institute — the scheme they produced later earned a place in the history of Chinese railway architecture.

"Elevated waiting, openings to the north and south": what it brought

The heart of the "new station"'s invention is eight words: elevated waiting, openings to the north and south.

It was the first passenger station in China to use elevated waiting over ground-level tracks.

What does that mean? A traditional station used "point waiting": passengers jammed into a waiting room, and at the appointed time surged through the ticket gate onto the platform. The "new station" raised the waiting rooms above the platforms, spreading the ticket-checking passenger flow across several waiting rooms — "point waiting" became "line waiting", the streams of passengers no longer crossed one another, and the distance travellers walked inside the station grew shorter. This layout of "ascending to enter, descending to leave, with no circuitous crossing" was later widely copied by railway stations across the country; the Hangzhou and Taiyuan stations built in the 1990s carried on the same model.

Beyond elevated waiting, the station's fittings were striking for the time:

• 18 lifts for passengers going up and down, in and out;
• 16 waiting rooms, all reserved and all air-conditioned;
• 5 ticket halls, 15 tracks and 7 platforms 500 metres long;
• on the east and west sides, one 9-metre-wide passenger underpass each.

In 2023 the "Shanghai Railway new station" was shortlisted in the seventh batch of China's 20th-century architectural heritage.

A set of passenger figures

Whether the new station worked well is best told by the passenger figures:

The "new" station of those years simply filled itself up, year after year.

Thirty years in front of the station: from "Bunye Cheng" to "station-city integration"

For Zhabei the station was never just a station.

In the early 1990s the Zhabei District planned the area around Shanghai Station as "Bunye Cheng" — the city that never sleeps — combining shopping, offices, dining, entertainment and housing, to shape a modern urban public activity centre running around the clock. In 1993 the Detailed Plan for Zhabei's Bunye Cheng was issued. This was one of the two heaviest strokes in the history of Zhabei's urban development (the other was Daning; see Daning Road Subdistrict).

The transport connections kept up, step by step:

• 1995: Metro Line 1 opened, with Shanghai Station as its starting point;
• the end of 2000: Line 3 (the Mingzhu line, converted from the old railway that crossed the city) began running;
• 2005: Line 4 began to share track with Line 3;
• the north square also links to the Shanghai Long-Distance Bus Terminal (which opened in November 2005).

In 2009–2010, to meet the passenger flow of the World Expo, the north square was extensively rebuilt and its underground space developed; on 29 May 2010 the north-square transfer station was completed and opened.

Today this station, nearly forty years old, is discussing its next subject — "station-city integration": how to change from a "transport node that people rush in and out of" into "a vibrant urban place". It is still the railway passenger station closest to central Shanghai, and still handles the main body of ordinary-speed trains and part of the high-speed service. Zhabei's "north gate" is still open.

Practical tips

• Address: 303 Moling Road (the south square); the north square is on the Zhongxing Road and Datong Road side;
• reachable by Metro Line 1 and Lines 3/4 (Shanghai Railway Station stop); the north and south squares are linked by an underpass;
• if you want to take in some railway history as well, the Shanghai Railway Museum (200 Tianmu East Road) stands on the site of its own predecessor, the old North Station, one metro stop away.

Connections

• Sub-district：Tianmu West Road Subdistrict
• See also：Shanghai Railway Museum and the Old North Station, Shanghai Railway Locomotive Depot, Beizhan Subdistrict, 8. Thirty Years of Catching Up, Daning Road Subdistrict

Sources: the preparation, the approval, the opening and the passenger figures follow the relevant chapters of the Shanghai Railway Gazetteer, together with public reports on the People's Daily Online Shanghai channel and Toutiao's "Modu 100"; the story of the "elevated waiting" design follows Tongji University News's interview with Professor Zhuang Yu and The Paper's report on the East China Institute's design archives; the "Bunye Cheng" plan follows the public material named above. The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.