The station was immediately adjacent to the Wilhelmshöher Allee crossing, ensuring good road connections.

[2] A smaller version was finally built, with a two-storey brick building decorated with terracotta with five opening on each side, avant-corps and a spire, which emphasised the central axis, in the Italianate Renaissance Revival style.

This was presumably deemed to interfere with operations so that in 1878/79 the railway was lowered by about six metres and a bridge was built over it carrying Wilhelmshöher Allee.

[2] It carried lignite and basalt mined in the Habichtswald to Wilhelmshöhe station, where it was transferred to the state railway.

[3] A few days after the Battle of Sedan on 5 September 1870, the captive Emperor Napoleon III was brought in a Belgian saloon car from Cologne over the Deutz–Gießen railway to Wilhelmshöhe station and then taken to the castle, which was assigned to him as a residence.

[2] In 1907, Emperor Wilhelm II received his uncle, King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, at the station before a crowd of 70,000 spectators for a one-day state visit.

He resided at the castle hotel and there organised the demobilisation of the German Army after the end of the First World War.

[2] During World War II, the station and its entrance buildings were severely damaged, but the road bridge that crosses it remained largely unscathed.

However, it collapsed in 1946, when a freight train with tank cars loaded with gasoline had a hot box fire while standing there.

[2] The station building, which had been severely damaged in the war was rebuilt in simplified forms and received a storage area built as an extension in the style of the 1950s.

[4] The planning status report of the preliminary route (Vortrassierung) of 1972/1973 foresaw a 6.4[5] kilometre-long tunnel running under Kassel.

It was estimated that the 18 km long comparison section in Kassel would cost 1.6 to 2.5 billion Deutsche Marks (1975 prices).

[8] A new station building at the Wilhelmshöhe site and variants with different above ground and underground access lines were investigated.

[11] Deutsche Bundesbahn favoured the Wilhelmshöhe location with an above ground approach, the so-called "western route" (Westtrasse).

[8] Discussions at first focused on complex problems of urban development, but gradually shifted to noise abatement issues.

[19] At the beginning of March 1985, the city and Deutsche Bundesbahn agreed on the design of the station and its transport links.

Particularly controversial was the desire of Deutsche Bundesbahn for the development of long ramps to the platforms so that cars could reach the tracks.

[20] The topping out ceremony of the station canopy, which marked the completion of the structural work on the entire new line, took place on 18 January 1990.

[8] This rests on 59 irregularly arranged columns,[11] 15 m (49 ft)-high[11] over the forecourt and also projects on the axis of Wilhelmshöher Allee.

On the afternoon of 29 May 1991, Jürgen Kastner, president of the Bundesbahndirektion (railway division) of Frankfurt, symbolically handed the key of an Intercity-Express (ICE) train that was on display to Kassel mayor Wolfram Bremeier.

The grand opening of the new station stood in the shadow of the symbolic start of operations on the high-speed rail services in Germany on the same day (29 May).

[11] Five ICE trains ran to the new station from Bonn, Hamburg, Mainz, Stuttgart and Munich[26][27] and reached it at the same time.

German President Richard von Weizsäcker symbolically switched the exit signal to green at 12:00 noon and declared high-speed traffic in the Federal Republic of Germany open.

[22] All northbound and southbound InterCityExpress services call at the station, with the exception of ICE Sprinter trains.

* to Köln Messe/Deutz tracks 11/12; five minutes longer to Hauptbahnhof The station is also served by trams and RegioTram Kassel.