Metro Stations and Crane Houses, Cologne
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In Cologne, we have various items on our agenda. For the morning these are two underground stations and the crane houses.
After a good breakfast, we arrived at the Metro-Station Severinstraße around 9:00 am. At first, we thought "boring", but if you go to the platforms you can find some interesting perspectives.
From here we walk to the Crane Houses (in German "Kranhäuser"). These are 3 skyscrapers built between 2006 and 2010. Their shape is supposed to remind us of the harbor cranes that used to unload the Rhine ships here. Unfortunately, the sky is already closing again. But there are always a few cloud gaps and it stays dry today.
We walk along the waterfront past the chocolate museum towards the city center. The menu of the museum restaurant is not uninteresting, but we just had breakfast.
At the beginning of the pedestrian zone, there is also the second subway station that we want to have a look at. The subway station Heumarkt was not opened until 2013, but before that, it already made a lot of headlines. For example, the collapse of the Cologne City Archive is directly connected to the construction of the tunnel towards Severinstraße.
Architecturally, however, it is definitely worth seeing. The big, wide halls are not typical for German subway stations.
Interestingly enough, there were very few passengers in both stations. On Saturday morning we expected something completely different and were actually already prepared to come back early on Sunday morning.