The Lahti railway station (, ) is located in the city of Lahti in Finland. History During the planning stages of the Saint Petersburg railway, two track alignment options were weighed with regard to connecting the fledgling Finnish railways with the important waterborne route on lake Päijänne: one passing through Anianpelto in Asikkala on the narrow isthmus between lake Vesijärvi and the Päijänne, and another grazing the Vesijärvi on its southern shore, in the village of Lahti in Hollola. The plan to build the line via Lahti was officialized in 1864, largely due to pragmatic reasons: the line turned out approximately shorter than should have it be built through Anianpelto, amounting to a time save of about two hours per trip between Helsinki and St. Petersburg. The diet of Finland in its 1867 session accepted the Senate's proposal to initiate work on the St. Petersburg railway in the following year. The fast schedule was intended to combat the economic fallout of the famine of 1866–1868, and the project indeed attracted numerous workers from all over Finland, a number of which settled in Lahti. The impoverished and malnourished workforce was ravaged by a typhoid epidemic, which inevitably made its way to the local population as well; out of the total population of about 7,000 of the parish of Hollola, 1,010 died in 1868, along with approximately 600 workers from elsewhere. As the only cemetery of the parish could not cope with the amount of the dead, a new one dedicated to the deceased builders was founded in the nearby village of Järvenpää, which also housed a temporary hospital. The Riihimäki–Saint Petersburg railway reached Lahti in August 1869, and the first train arrived there just three months later, on 1 November. Around the same time, a siding to the shore of the Vesijärvi was built and the Vesijärvi railway station established, marking the beginning of the development of Lahti's status as a crossing between the railway and the waterborne traffic on the Päijänne. The first station building in Lahti, built according to stock plans from Knut Nylander for class III stations, was completed in 1869; however, it was destroyed in a fire soon after its opening. A new station was designed in 1873, again by Nylander, and its construction was completed in 1874. It bore a resemblance to the original Vyborg railway station building, presumed to have been designed by either Nylander