The Most Beautiful Railway Stations in the World
22 places in 17 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful railway stations in the world are St Pancras railway station (United Kingdom), Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line) (Russia) and Milano Centrale (Italy). The list covers 22 railway stations in 17 countries. The United States has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The great stations were built as gateways to cities and as cathedrals of a new age. Their architects had to solve two problems at once: a vast iron shed wide enough for trains and smoke, and a facade grand enough to announce the city to everyone arriving. The finest ones still feel like an event, whether through a single span of glass, a painted vault, walls of tiles telling national history, or underground halls carved and decorated as if they were palaces.
This collection mixes main-line terminals and metro stations. St Pancras in London pairs William Barlow's arched train shed with George Gilbert Scott's Gothic hotel front. São Bento in Porto is lined with blue and white azulejo panels by Jorge Colaço, and Eliel Saarinen's Helsinki Central guards its entrance with granite figures holding lamps. Grand Central Terminal in New York spreads a sky of constellations across its main concourse, while Canfranc stands high in the Pyrenees as a monument to an international line. Below ground, Komsomolskaya in Moscow is a hall of chandeliers and mosaics, T-Centralen in Stockholm paints its raw rock caverns blue, and Toledo in Naples sinks into a shaft of blue light.
The stations were chosen for how they look and ranked by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph whose author is named and a point on the map, and the section opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
01 St Pancras railway station
United Kingdom · 3.2 km from London51.530° N 0.125° W
Colin · CC BY-SA 3.0 St Pancras is two buildings that happen to be one: a vast iron train shed and, in front of it, a red-brick Gothic hotel that looks like a cathedral. The Midland Railway built the station after its trains were stuck for months on other companies' lines into London during the 1862 exhibition. The engineer William Henry Barlow roofed the platforms with a single span of wrought-iron lattice ribs springing straight from the platform level, about 210 m long, 73 m wide and 30 m high; when it opened in 1868 it was the largest enclosed space in the world. Because the tracks had to cross the Regent's Canal, the platforms sit well above street level, and the space underneath was laid out on the grid of a Burton beer warehouse. That undercroft is now the station's shopping arcade and the Eurostar departure hall.
Did you know? In 1978 British Rail tried to sell the original Dent clock, but it shattered during removal and went to a retiring guard, Roland Hoggard, for £25.
02 Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line)
Russia · 3.7 km from Moscow55.776° N 37.656° E
A.Savin · CC BY-SA 3.0 Under the Moscow square where three main-line railway terminals meet, the Circle line has its grandest hall. Komsomolskaya on the Koltsevaya line opened on 30 January 1952 and is a late Stalinist palace in all but function: a nave 190 metres long, 11 metres wide and 9 metres high, wider and taller than any other column station on the network, lined with 68 octagonal columns faced in pale Uzbek marble. Overhead, a vaulted yellow ceiling is worked with Baroque stucco and hung with heavy, many-armed chandeliers, so that the trains seem to arrive in a ballroom rather than a station.
Did you know? Alexey Shchusev died in 1949, three years before the station opened, and received the Stalin Prize for it posthumously in 1951 together with Pavel Korin.
03 Milano Centrale
Stazione di Milano Centrale
Italy · 1.5 km from Milan45.486° N 9.204° E
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milano Centrale is less a railway station than a monument to arrival. Its main front, facing Piazza Duca d'Aosta, stretches about 200 metres wide and some 50 metres high, a massive stone wall of arches, columns, reliefs and sculpture that reads more like a palace or a temple than a place to catch a train. The architect Ulisse Stacchini won the design competition in 1912 with a project titled "In Motu Vita", life in motion. The First World War and the economic crisis that followed stalled the work, and building resumed in earnest only in 1925; the station opened on 1 July 1931.
Did you know? Its cornerstone was laid by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1906, years before any design for the building had actually been chosen.
04 Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus
India · 14.9 km from Mumbai18.940° N 72.835° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rangan Datta Wiki · CC BY-SA 4.0 The station was designed by British architect Frederick William Stevens and built between 1878 and 1888, in a High Victorian Gothic style modelled loosely on late medieval Italian buildings — but Stevens didn't stop at importing a European style wholesale. The stone dome, the turrets, the deliberately irregular ground plan all draw on Indian palace architecture too, the product of British architects working directly alongside Indian craftsmen and stonemasons on every detail. It became, quite literally, the image people used to describe Bombay as a "Gothic City," and it's one of relatively few buildings anywhere that visibly argues two architectural traditions into a single coherent structure rather than layering one on top of the other.
Did you know? An allegorical statue of Progress crowns the central dome, holding a torch raised in one hand and a spoked railway wheel in the other.
05 T-Centralen
Sweden · 0.9 km from Stockholm59.332° N 18.061° E
Image by john_Ioannidis from Pixabay Deep beneath the centre of Stockholm, the platforms of the Blue Line at T-Centralen look less like a transit hub than a painted cave. The rough rock vault left by the tunnelling crews is coated in white, and across it run deep blue tendrils of leaves and flowers, broken here and there by the silhouettes of the workers who blasted the station out of the bedrock. The decoration is the work of the Swedish artist Per Olov Ultvedt, and it has become one of the most photographed images of the Stockholm metro, a network often described as the longest art gallery in the world.
Did you know? Before it opened the station was planned under the name Klara, after the surrounding district and its church, St. Klara.
06 Helsinki Central Railway Station
Finland · 0.9 km from Helsinki60.171° N 24.941° E
Image by RivkahPro from Pixabay Few buildings announce a country's arrival in the modern world as clearly as Helsinki's main railway station. The competition for it was held in 1902, when Finland was still a grand duchy of the Russian Empire, and it was won by the young Eliel Saarinen with an entry titled "A winged wheel standing on a globe". The building that went up from 1912 is late Art Nouveau with a strong national romantic accent, built of concrete and iron behind its stone front. The First World War interrupted the work, and the station finally opened on 5 March 1919 — in a newly independent Finland.
Did you know? Saarinen's prize-winning entry was decorated with eight bears, but he later redesigned the whole building in a more modern spirit after travelling in Europe.
07 São Bento railway station
Estação Ferroviária de Porto — São Bento
Portugal · 1.2 km from Porto41.145° N 8.610° W
Claude from en Suisse romande · CC BY 4.0 Most people come to São Bento without a train to catch. The station's entrance hall is one of the great tiled rooms of Portugal: some 20,000 azulejos, covering about 551 square metres of wall, painted by Jorge Colaço between 1905 and 1916 and made at the Sacavém factory. Colaço laid the first tile on 13 August 1905, and the work took eleven years. The big set pieces are done in blue on white, the classic Portuguese manner, while a band of polychrome tiles runs around the top of the hall like a picture book, tracing the ways people travelled in different corners of Portugal.
Did you know? Long before the station, plans for a central Porto terminus surfaced in 1864, and a first design was drawn up by Hippolyte de Bare in 1887.
08 Haydarpaşa railway station
Turkey · 4.4 km from Istanbul40.996° N 29.019° E
Image by muratortasil from Pixabay Haydarpaşa station stands at the water's edge on the Asian shore of Istanbul, a massive stone block in a German-inflected Neoclassical style that seems oddly northern on the Bosphorus. The impression is well founded. It was built for the German-backed Anatolian Railway, as the Istanbul terminus of the line that was meant to run on through Anatolia to Baghdad, and it was designed by the German architects Otto Ritter and Helmuth Cuno. The building was finished on 19 August 1909 and inaugurated that November.
Did you know? The terminal was inaugurated on 4 November 1909, a date chosen to coincide with the birthday of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed V.
09 Grand Central Terminal
United States · 3.8 km from New York City40.753° N 73.977° W
Image by jplenio from Pixabay Grand Central Terminal is a commuter station that became one of the most visited buildings in the world: some 21 million people came in 2018 just to look, not counting passengers. It stands at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and opened in 1913, the third station of that name on the site, built by the New York Central Railroad. With 44 platforms serving 67 tracks on two underground levels, it has more platforms than any other station on earth, and at the morning peak a train arrives about every minute.
Did you know? The constellations on the Main Concourse ceiling are largely painted back to front; a commuter noticed the mistake in 1913, and it has never been corrected.
10 Oculus (World Trade Center Transportation Hub)
World Trade Center
United States · 1.7 km from New York City40.712° N 74.011° W
Image by Schmid-Reportagen from Pixabay At the World Trade Center site, the architect Santiago Calatrava built a railway station that looks as though it might take off. The World Trade Center Transportation Hub, known for its main hall, the Oculus, opened on 3 March 2016. Calatrava's starting image was a bird released from a child's hands: from the street, white steel ribs sweep up and outward from two long arches, like the wings of a dove caught at the instant of flight. It is one of the most expensive stations ever built — its cost ran to around four billion dollars — and it has been both admired and fiercely criticised for that extravagance.
Did you know? The structure uses about 11,500 tons of structural steel.
11 Gare do Oriente
Portugal · 6.3 km from Lisbon38.768° N 9.099° W
Image by ricardoadelaide from Pixabay Lisbon's Oriente station turns a railway junction into a piece of sculpture. Designed by the Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, it carries its trains on a platform raised about 19 metres above the street, sheltered by a lattice canopy of glass and steel whose slender ribs and pointed vaults have often been compared to Gothic architecture. The design recalls Calatrava's earlier Allen Lambert Galleria in Toronto, and it won a Brunel Award for railway architecture in October 1998, only months after opening.
Did you know? The metro station beneath Oriente holds eleven artworks by artists from five continents, including Hundertwasser, Yayoi Kusama, Erró, Zao Wou-Ki and Magdalena Abakanowicz.
12 Antwerp Central Station
Belgium · 0.8 km from Antwerp51.217° N 4.421° E
Image by ClickerHappy from Pixabay Antwerp's main station was built to impress, and it still does. Architect Louis Delacenserie designed the passenger building between 1895 and 1905 as a monumental hall crowned by a dome some 75 metres high, and the people of the city soon named it the spoorwegkathedraal, the railway cathedral. Delacenserie, who called his own manner a baroque-medieval eclecticism, is said to have borrowed the idea of the dome from the Pantheon in Rome and the overall arrangement from the then brand-new station at Lucerne. The result is often ranked among the most beautiful stations anywhere: Newsweek placed it fourth in the world in 2009, and Mashable put it first in 2014.
Did you know? A V-2 rocket strike during the Second World War left a permanent wave-shaped warp in the train hall roof that is still visible today.
13 Cincinnati Union Terminal
United States · 3.8 km from Covington39.110° N 84.538° W
Ɱ · CC BY-SA 4.0 The half-dome of Cincinnati Union Terminal rises over the end of a long, sloping plaza like a giant radio set or a rising sun, and it is precisely that silhouette that made the building famous far beyond Ohio. Inside, the rotunda spans 180 feet and climbs 106 feet, and when the station opened it was the largest half-dome in the Western Hemisphere, a record it held over the world until the Sydney Opera House was completed in 1973. Its walls carry vast mosaics by the German-born artist Winold Reiss: two murals more than a hundred feet long trace the history of the United States and of Cincinnati, while further panels depict the city's workers in its factories and workshops. Taken together, Reiss's mosaics formed the largest collection of secular mosaics in the country at the time.
Did you know? The rotunda doubles as a whispering gallery: channels around the great front arch let two people standing about 30 metres apart hold a quiet conversation.
14 Kanazawa Station
Japan · 2.1 km from Kanazawa36.578° N 136.648° E
MaedaAkihiko · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kanazawa Station greets arrivals with an umbrella and a drum. On the east side, facing the old castle town, a vast canopy of glass and aluminium alloy, made of 3,019 glass panes set in a geometric lattice, spreads over the forecourt. It is called the Motenashi Dome, the "hospitality dome", and the idea behind it is simple and local: Kanazawa is known for its frequent rain and snow, and the city wanted to hold an umbrella over everyone stepping off the train. At the edge of the dome stands the Tsuzumi-mon, a gate 13.7 metres high carried on two massive spiralling pillars that recall the tsuzumi, the hourglass-shaped hand drum played in Noh theatre in the Kaga Hōshō tradition, one of the city's classic performing arts.
Did you know? The Shinkansen departure melody at Kanazawa was composed by Yasutaka Nakata, the Kanazawa-born music producer.
15 Toledo
Italy · 0.5 km from Naples40.842° N 14.249° E
Zaiar95 · CC0 Riding the escalators down into Toledo station in Naples feels like sinking from the city into the sea. The upper levels are lined in warm ochre tiles that recall the volcanic tuff on which Naples is built; then, as the stairs descend, everything turns to deep, shimmering blue mosaic, with light rippling across the walls like sunlight seen from below the waves. Since it opened in 2012 the station on Line 1 of the Naples Metro has been repeatedly named among the most beautiful underground stations in the world, and it won the Emirates LEAF Award for Public Building of the Year in 2013 and an International Tunnelling Association award in 2015.
Did you know? The Naples section of Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics has installed a cosmic-ray detector inside the station as a piece of public science outreach.
16 Old Kuala Lumpur Railway Station
Malaysia · 0.5 km from Kuala Lumpur3.139° N 101.693° E
Gryffindor · Public domain The old Kuala Lumpur railway station looks like a palace dreamed up for a Mughal emperor who happened to run a railway. It was designed by Arthur Benison Hubback, an architect in the colonial Public Works Department who had already given the city its Old City Hall and the Jamek Mosque, and it belongs to the same family of buildings as the Sultan Abdul Samad Building on Merdeka Square: British structures dressed in a style borrowed from Islamic India, with horseshoe and ogee arches and domed chhatri pavilions crowning the corners. The station opened for traffic on 1 August 1910, built for 23,000 Straits dollars, and the whole complex was finished in 1917.
Did you know? A popular story holds that the station's iron roof was built to British railway specifications strong enough to carry snow, in a city that never sees any.
17 Dunedin railway station
New Zealand · 1.8 km from Dunedin45.875° S 170.509° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Dunedin's railway station looks like a town hall from Flanders that took a wrong turn and landed in the far south of New Zealand. It was designed by George Troup, who spent his working life with New Zealand Railways and later headed its architectural branch, in a free Flemish Renaissance manner, and its fussy, cheerful ornament earned him the nickname "Gingerbread George" for the rest of his career. Troup himself preferred the Scottish Baronial alternative he had also drawn up. The foundation stone was laid by the railways minister Joseph Ward in June 1904, and Ward, by then prime minister, opened the building on 12 November 1906. It came in on budget, at £40,000.
Did you know? In 2013 a hotel baker rebuilt the station of 'Gingerbread George' in actual gingerbread, a fully edible model 1.5 metres long.
18 Liège-Guillemins railway station
Station Luik-Guillemins
Belgium · 1.1 km from Liège50.625° N 5.567° E
Fred Romero from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 Liège-Guillemins is a station without walls. Santiago Calatrava's design, opened on 18 September 2009 after about a decade of work, throws a single enormous vault of steel, glass and white concrete over the tracks: a great arch some 160 metres long and 32 metres high, ribbed like the skeleton of a whale, with no enclosing façade in the usual sense. From the city side the building reads less as an entrance than as a canopy lifted off the ground, with the wooded hill of Cointe rising directly behind it, and the space underneath is open to the wind, so that the concourse feels more like a covered square than a hall.
Did you know? The vault rests on 39 white steel arches, and the glazed roof they carry covers an area of about 33,000 square metres.
19 Maputo Central Railway Station
Estação do Caminho de Ferro de Maputo
Mozambique · 3 km from Maputo25.971° S 32.564° E
Claus Wonnemann · CC BY-SA 4.0 Maputo's central station is the grandest piece of colonial architecture in Mozambique and one of the handsomest railway buildings in Africa. Work began in 1908, the building was inaugurated on 19 March 1910 in a modest ceremony before the governor-general, and decoration continued until 1916. The initial plans came from the engineers Mario Veiga and Alfredo Augusto Lisboa de Lima; from 1913 the façade was enriched with ornament by Pietro Buffa Buccellato, and a great central dome was added. The result is a Beaux-Arts palace in brick and cement, rising to about 51 metres facing the square now called Praça dos Trabalhadores.
Did you know? Before the present palace, the city's first station, opened in 1895, was a modest structure of wood and corrugated zinc.
20 Gare de Limoges-Bénédictins
Limoges-Bénédictins
France · 1.5 km from Limoges45.836° N 1.268° E
Le train, c'est trop bien · CC BY 4.0 Few provincial towns can claim a railway station that looks like a cathedral of the machine age, but Limoges can. The Gare des Bénédictins takes its name from the Benedictine convent that once occupied the site, and it was raised between the mid-1920s and 1929 for the Compagnie du Paris-Orléans to designs by the architect Roger Gonthier. It opened on 2 July 1929, replacing two earlier stations — a wooden shed of 1856 and a stone building of 1860 — and immediately became the emblem of a city better known for its porcelain.
Did you know? In 2022 internet users voted it the most beautiful station in France in a poll run by SNCF Gares & Connexions, beating Saint-Brieuc and Troyes in the final.
21 Formosa Boulevard Station
Taiwan · 3.6 km from Kaohsiung22.631° N 120.302° E
Image by allanlau2000 from Pixabay Below a busy road junction in the centre of Kaohsiung, the concourse of Formosa Boulevard station opens into a round hall roofed by a vast canopy of coloured glass. The Dome of Light, 30 metres in diameter and composed of thousands of individual glass panels, is often described as the largest glass work in the world, and it turns an underground interchange of the city's metro into one of the best-known public artworks in Taiwan.
Did you know? The station's main circular structure, 140 metres across, is described as the largest underground circular station in the world.
22 Canfranc International Station
Estación Internacional de Canfranc
Spain42.751° N 0.514° W
Marc Celeiro · CC BY-SA 4.0 Canfranc International station is a palace built for a frontier that barely needed it. It stands in a narrow valley of the Spanish Pyrenees, beside the southern mouth of the Somport rail tunnel that runs under the mountains into France. The tunnel was dug between 1912 and 1915; the station, designed under the Spanish engineer Fernando Ramírez de Dampierre, was begun in 1923 and inaugurated on 18 July 1928 by King Alfonso XIII and the French president Gaston Doumergue. Its main building is some 240 metres long, lit by 365 windows and pierced by 156 doors, and when it opened it was said to be the second-largest station in Europe, after Leipzig.
Did you know? Although on Spanish soil, the station had extraterritorial status: one half was run by France, the other by Spain, with bilingual signs throughout.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful railway station in the world?
- On our list, St Pancras railway station (United Kingdom) ranks first, followed by Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line) (Russia) and Milano Centrale (Italy).
- Which country has the most beautiful railway stations?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (3), Belgium (2) and Italy (2).
- What is the most beautiful metro station?
- Underground stations in this collection include Komsomolskaya on the Moscow Metro, T-Centralen in Stockholm and Toledo in Naples.
- Why are the constellations on Grand Central's ceiling reversed?
- The zodiac painted on the main concourse ceiling appears as a mirror image of the night sky, as if seen from outside the celestial sphere. The reversal was noticed soon after the terminal opened in 1913 and has been kept ever since.
- How many railway stations are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 22 railway stations in 17 countries. The United States has the most, with 3.