Liebenswerda were stubbornly opposed to the railway having direct contact with their towns. So a slightly more westerly route was chosen that passed near the small village and manor of Falkenberg. The station was initially a small halt with a station master, a telegrapher, two signalmen and some shunters. A railway from Falkenberg to Cottbus was opened by the Halle-Sorau-Guben Railway (Halle-Sorau-Gubener Eisenbahn, HSGE) on 1 December 1871. At first the trains stopped in the lower part of the old station. A line running to the west from Falkenberg via Eilenburg to Halle was opened on 1 May 1872. In the same year the Upper Lusatian Railway Company (Oberlausitzer Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft) began construction of its line from Kohlfurt (now Węgliniec) to Falkenberg, which was opened on 1 June 1874. This was followed by the BAE’s extension of its line from Wittenberg on 15 October 1875, creating connections to lines to Halle and Dessau. The BAE took over the management on the lines of the Upper Lusatian Railway Company in 1878. The traffic on all three lines became very active in the following years, so that Falkenberg became an important railway junction. In 1882 a new, larger station building was built at the intersection of the upper and lower lines. In the same year the Prussian government took over the management of the lines of the BAE and two years later it took over the HSGE. Nevertheless, the names of the Halle-Sorauer Bahnhof (Halle-Sorau station) for the upper level and the Berlin-Anhalter Bahnhof (Berlin-Anhalt station) for the lower level persisted. The then competent Staatsbahndirektion (railway division) of Erfurt combined the two workshops of the BAE and HSGE, and from 1887 they were referred to as an operating workshop (Betriebswerkstätte), which later developed into a locomotive depot (Bahnbetriebswerk). Expansion after 1890 Traffic increased significantly to Falkenberg at the end of the 19th century. The three main railway lines were doubled from 1896 to 1912 to overcome their capacity constraints. The station facilities with the marshalling yards and workshops were extended. A new water tower was built in 1895 and another engine shed was put in operation at the lower station in 1908. The last of the railways built to Falkenberg was opened on 15 March 1898, the private Lower Lusatian Railway to Uckro. In a train accident in the summer of 1934, a freight train in the lower part on station ran into