Praha hlavní nádraží (IATA: XYG)[2] is the largest railway station in Prague, Czech Republic.

[8] The station has been in operation since 14 December 1871, when the southbound Emperor Franz Joseph Railway service to Benešov, Tábor and Vienna started from it.

The original narrative building was built according to the design of Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann and Antonín Viktor Barvitius in a Renaissance Revival style.

The 150-meter-long building with two towers, a hall with a coffered ceiling, a restaurant, offices and 22 doors leading to a mosaic-paved platform has earned the nickname "castle station".

[10] The dome above the main part of the building is decorated with art nouveau motifs and sculptures by Stanislav Sucharda and Ladislav Šaloun depicting Czech cities.

Passengers were served by generously designed waiting rooms in the left wing of the building and two restaurants of different price levels.

From the beginning, the building also had offices and lounges for important guests, where for example Tomáš Masaryk, Thomas Edison, Le Corbusier or Charlie Chaplin waited for the train.

[11][3] The lounges were luxuriously furnished, decorated with sculptures and large-scale paintings with motifs of Prague and Karlštejn from the studios of Václav Jansa and Viktor Stretti.

Underpasses were built together with the new building, the railway yard was roofed in 1905–1906[9] by a two-nave steel arched hall with a span of 2 x 33.3 m, a height of 18 m and a length of 233 m, the authors of which were Jaroslav Marjanko and Rudolf Kornfeld.

[13] At that time, the businessman Emil Kolben made an offer to the Austro-Hungarian State Railways to electrify the Prague junctions with a 10 kV 16 Hz system, but it was not accepted.

[citation needed] After the Second World War, a number of studies were prepared for the reconstruction of the station in connection with the increase of its capacity.

In the years 1948–1956, other proposals were created (authors Josef Danda, Cyril Suk, collectives of the project institutes SUDOP Prague [cs] and Stavoprojekt).

At the beginning of the 1960s, an internal competition took place in SUDOP (in which designs were created by architects Homoláč and Reiterman, Jaroslav Otruba, and Josef Danda).

In 1965, a public competition was announced, in which the design of the collective Eugen Kramár, Berta Hornema, J. Gerstbrein won, proposing the abolition of the historic building.

The new terminal building claimed a large part of the park, and the construction of the road cut off the neo-renaissance station hall from the town.

The government decided to build a subway instead of a tram only after the start of construction, in August 1967, which is why the less typical station has two side platforms instead of one in the middle.

From 1972 to 1979, a new underground check-in hall was created on the basis of an architectural competition (stylistically classified as brutalism),[citation needed] which gave way to a part of the existing Vrchlické sady.

The station track and with it the historic steel hall (except for the 1st platform) remained in the property of the Správa železnic, which carried out reconstruction activities independently of the Grandi Stazioni.

Together, since 2006, under the direction of Grandi Stazioni, it has been possible to modernize the underground check-in hall and the central part of the historic Art Nouveau building (the SŽDC was preparing the reconstruction of other parts of the building)[22] and at the same time, under the baton of the SŽDC, the opening of the Nové spojení and the associated reconstruction of the underpasses and platforms 1–4 took place, and finally, after a pause of several years, the repair and glazing of the historic hall above the platforms.

The work was divided into two investment projects[28] and for organizational reasons into several stages in order to minimize the number of excluded tracks and platforms.

The underground hall is divided into two floors, where there are shops, restaurants and fast food, ticket counters, seating and other services such as showers, toilets, exchange offices, ATMs, bike and luggage storage.

[31] In 2011 a partial refurbishment of the station was completed by Italian company Grandi Stazioni,[32] which had leased retail space for 30 years from 2002.

[33] In 2016 Grandi Stazioni lost the concession after failing to complete the renovation of the historic building by the extended contractual deadline.

[37] The sculpture is complemented by a plaque with the inscription: "Dedicated with deep gratitude to Sir Nicholas Winton and all the compassionate people who saved 669 children from the horrors of World War II by 8 train transports to Great Britain in 1939 and in memory of the 15,131 Czechoslovak children murdered in concentration camps.

The memorial was unveiled by Winton's children, Zuzana Marešová and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, who along with their great-grandchildren provided hand casts for the glass inset of the door.

Trams are available from the stop "Hlavní nádraží", which is located in Bolzanova street approximately 250 meters from the station exit.

101 at a distance of about 400 m. The park in front of the station (officially Vrchlické sady, popularly called Sherwood) is frequented by homeless people and drug addicts and the place is also notorious as a crossroads of male homosexual prostitution.

[44] In addition to international services, trains serve most of the larger Czech cities, such as Brno, Plzeň, České Budějovice, and Olomouc.