The station is situated at the northern end of the relatively straight Duisburg to Düsseldorf railway line which has to cope with one of the highest daily loads in continental Europe.

North of the station, seven tracks run to the River Ruhr crossing (which is a sight on the Route der Industriekultur (Route of industrial heritage) due to a maze of girder bridges) where a three track line split for Oberhausen and on to Arnhem and the other line runs to Dortmund via Gelsenkirchen.

The station is an important hub for InterCityExpress, InterCity and EuroCity trains from and to the Netherlands, Berlin, Switzerland, Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne.

Its 6 platforms are covered by a train shed at their southern ends and modern canopies to the north where there is a second concourse housing the bus and tram stops.

This work is expected to take several years[4] As is usual with station of its size, Duisburg Hbf has a number of shops on its concourse and in the main hall.

In the station building outside the concourse there is a hotel and local newspaper offices, and there used to be a fairly large night club which closed in early 2006 and has remained empty since.

Finally, on 15 February 1870, a three kilometre long branch line was opened by the Rhenish Railway Company (Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, RHE) from the Rheinhausen–Hochfeld train ferry to Duisburg, which became the starting point of its new route to Quakenbrück, completed in 1879.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the station, which had been taken over by Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1920 when it absorbed the Prussian State Railway, was extended and rebuilt to its present size.

The two sculptures at the front of a steel frame structure built for the ticket hall are by the Essen sculptor Joseph Enseling.

In 1992, as part of the inauguration of the Duisburg Stadtbahn (light rail), the new northern connecting hall (Verknüpfungshalle) was opened, all six platforms were lengthened to several hundred metres over the former road underpass connecting Mühlheimerstraße and Königstraße and provided with simple platform roofs, which are easily distinguished from the old station hall.

On 12 December 2008 Deutsche Bahn and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia announced that much-needed renovation work would begin in mid of 2009.