city, which had often been called the "pearl of the baroque", was reduced to a pile of rubble within 19 minutes. Following the destruction on 23 February of the station built by Friedrich Bürklein, the station building of the Ludwig station was now also destroyed; since the closing of railway operations it had been used as a school. The ruins of the Ludwig station were completely removed up to the early 1960s and today's Mainfranken Theater Würzburg was built in its place. Shortly after the war work began on the reconstruction of the railway facilities. Since the station had been almost completely destroyed, the then Deutsche Bundesbahn and the responsible architect, Bundesbahn inspector Hans Kern decided against a reconstruction of the building and to build a new building. It was built in the unadorned style of 1950s modernism. The wide front was completely glazed and concrete pillars supported the slightly overhanging roof. Construction of the entrance hall began in 1952 and it was opened on 2 October 1954 at the conclusion of the electrification of the Fürth–Würzburg line. After further stages of construction, the building was completed in 1961. Inside there was a large entrance hall, which among other things housed a ticket office and various shops. The northern side of the hall was adorned by an attached stone mosaic of the Eichstätt artist Alois Wünsche-Mitterecker that had a cross-sectional image of a class 44 steam locomotive at its original size. As repeated vibrations caused by departing trains broke part of the wall panelling, the mosaic was removed in 1958 and installed in the Nuremberg Transport Museum. The division of Germany and recent development since the 1980s Würzburg Hauptbahnhof has a central location in Germany and was always a major hub for rail transport, but after the division of Germany its importance increased again. While rail traffic between the north and the southeast of the country had previously been distributed over several routes, now the lines through the Thuringian Forest, the Franconian Forest and the Vogtland were truncated. All the trains that had to be operated along the Inner German border, including the routes to Munich via Würzburg and Nuremberg caused a considerable increase in the workload for Würzburg. In the timetable of 1979/80, 300 passenger, 250 freight trains and 100 other trains operated through Würzburg station on weekdays. About 60 passenger and 50 freight trains were shunted at the