History of The Railway Station
The original station at Manor House Street (closer to the Humber Estuary) opened in 1840. The current station of 2.5 acres (10,000 m2) was opened by the York and North Midland Railway as "Hull Paragon Street station" on 8 May 1848 (though not officially until 1851) as a centrally-located railway terminal for Hull, with a three-bay pitched-roof trainshed. The name Paragon Station derives from a nearby street name. The adjacent hotel, named the Royal Station Hotel after a stay by Queen Victoria in 1854, but later renamed the Royal Hotel was added in 1851. Both the station and the hotel were designed by George Townsend Andrews, who died in 1853, young and in poverty, four years after the decline in fortune and death of George Hudson, the 'Railway King'.
The Y&NMR became part of the North Eastern Railway, created in 1854 by merger with other railway companies. The NER changed the station name to "Hull Paragon". Half a century later the NER rebuilt and expanded the station, creating the last of Britain's great barrel-vaulted glass-and-iron railway stations, being reopened in 1904 with a five-bay trainshed (see picture above right) and two additional barrel vault bays at right angles covering the concourse (see picture below right).
The four railway lines on the south side of the station and outside the canopy (see right-hand side of the top picture) were used by passengers transiting from Europe to the USA via Liverpool, often fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe in the 19th century,. Because of the cholera outbreaks in Hull of 1832 and 1849 and the sensitivity of the city to the reintroduction of this disease many left from a quarantine building next to the southernmost of these four lines. This building still exists and fronts on to Anlaby Road. A small ticket office still exists on the platform next to the northernmost of these four lines.
The Royal Station Hotel was subsequently enlarged in a style somewhat unsympathetic with the elegant and coherent appearance of the original 1851 building, this also necessitating some shortening of the adjacent main station entrance portico which had been part of the 1904 station rebuild and extension. This portico was swept away completely in the early 1960s to be replaced by Paragon House, a typical 1960s concrete and glass structure, which in turn was demolished in 2007. The hotel was significantly damaged in a fire and then rebuilt in 1990.
On 14 February 1927 it was the site of a head-on train collision in which 12 passengers were killed and 24 seriously injured, caused by a signalling error.
The station has survived the bombing of two world wars and subsequent decades of redevelopment. The new transport interchange was officially opened by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh when they unveiled a plaque on 5 March 2009 after arriving at the station on the Royal Train.
First TransPennine Express was awarded Station Excellence Of The Year at the HSBC Rail Business Awards 2007 for the interchange.
Read more about this topic: Hull Paragon Interchange
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