The Most Beautiful Railway Stations in Asia
6 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful railway stations in Asia are Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line) (Russia), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (India) and Haydarpaşa railway station (Turkey). The list covers 6 railway stations in 6 countries. India has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Railway stations were the cathedrals of the industrial age, and across Asia they became showpieces of the ambitions of the powers that built them. Colonial administrations in India and Malaya blended European Gothic and classical forms with local domes and arches; the Ottoman Empire turned to German architects for the terminus of its new railways; the Soviet Union built metro stations as underground palaces; and modern Japan and Taiwan have used stations as canvases for contemporary design.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in Mumbai, built as Victoria Terminus and completed in 1888 to designs by Frederick William Stevens, combines Victorian Gothic with Indian motifs and is a World Heritage Site. The Old Kuala Lumpur Railway Station, designed by Arthur Benison Hubback and opened in 1910, is crowned with Moorish-style domes and pavilions. Haydarpaşa station, on the waterfront at Kadıköy in Istanbul, was built in the early twentieth century as a neo-Renaissance terminus rising directly from the sea.
Komsomolskaya station on Moscow's Circle Line is the most lavish of the Soviet metro palaces, a yellow Baroque hall with chandeliers and ceiling mosaics by Pavel Korin. Kanazawa Station in Japan greets travellers with the Tsuzumi-mon, a wooden gate inspired by the hand drums of Noh theatre, in front of a glass dome. And Formosa Boulevard Station in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, is crowned by the Dome of Light, a vast circular work of coloured glass by Narcissus Quagliata.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line) | Railway station | Russia | |
| 2 | Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus | Railway station | India | ✓ |
| 3 | Haydarpaşa railway station | Railway station | Turkey | |
| 4 | Kanazawa Station | Railway station | Japan | |
| 5 | Old Kuala Lumpur Railway Station | Railway station | Malaysia | |
| 6 | Formosa Boulevard Station | Railway station | Taiwan |
01 Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line)
Russia · 3.7 km from Moscow55.776° N 37.656° E
A.Savin · CC BY-SA 3.0 The design was Alexey Shchusev's, carried through to completion by a team that included Viktor Kokorin. The programme was explicitly patriotic: Shchusev conceived the hall as an illustration of a speech Stalin gave on 7 November 1941, in the first winter of the war, and the painter Pavel Korin answered it with eight large ceiling mosaics in smalt and semi-precious stone, set into the vault between the chandeliers: Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Minin and Pozharsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov, culminating in Soviet soldiers at the Reichstag. Between them smaller gilded panels show trophies and weapons.
Did you know? The final ceiling mosaic contains more than 300,000 pieces, covers 31.5 square metres and weighs over three tonnes.
02 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 It's also never stopped being exactly what it was built to be. More than three million commuters pass through daily, making it one of the busiest railway stations on the planet — a 19th-century monument functioning, unglamorously and continuously, as ordinary infrastructure rather than something roped off for tourists.
Did you know? At the main gates stand a lion representing Britain and a tiger representing India.
03 Haydarpaşa railway station
Turkey · 4.4 km from Istanbul40.996° N 29.019° E
Image by muratortasil from Pixabay The ground here was soft shoreline, and the station rests on 1,100 wooden piles, each 21 metres long, driven into the soft shore by a steam hammer. The façades are faced with Hereke–Lefke stone, and inside, the passenger halls were lit by stained glass. Seen from a ferry crossing from the European side, the station rises directly from the sea, with the great bulk of the terminal reflected in the water and the Haydarpaşa ferry pier at its feet; the pier building was added in 1917 to a design by the Turkish architect Vedat Tek and decorated with Kütahya tiles.
Did you know? The station was chosen in 1904 as the northern terminus of both the Baghdad Railway and the Hejaz Railway toward Arabia.
04 Kanazawa Station
Japan · 2.1 km from Kanazawa36.578° N 136.648° E
MaedaAkihiko · CC BY-SA 4.0 Both were completed in March 2005, designed by the architect Ryūzō Shirae, and they did what the city intended: turned a railway entrance into a symbol, one side for the Kanazawa of tradition, the other for the modern city. In 2011 the American magazine Travel + Leisure put Kanazawa sixth in its list of the world's most beautiful stations, the only Japanese station on it. The contrast is the thing to look at: the open, almost weightless mesh of the dome against the heavy, sculptural gate.
Did you know? A waiting room wall of Noto hiba wood is pierced with 236 round niches that display real pieces of Wajima and Yamanaka lacquerware.
05 Old Kuala Lumpur Railway Station
Malaysia · 0.5 km from Kuala Lumpur3.139° N 101.693° E
Gryffindor · Public domain What catches the eye is the roofline. Large chhatris sit at the corners of the building, six in the original design and two more added in the 1980s, with smaller ones repeated along the front, all above a long, arcaded façade that is entirely plastered and painted white or cream rather than left in exposed brick like many of its neighbours. Stand across Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin and the station pairs up with the Railway Administration Building directly opposite, designed in the same idiom, so that the street runs between two white fantasies of arches and domes.
Did you know? Kuala Lumpur's first railway, a line to Klang, was inaugurated on 22 September 1886, long before this station was built.
06 Formosa Boulevard Station
Taiwan · 3.6 km from Kaohsiung22.631° N 120.302° E
Image by allanlau2000 from Pixabay The dome is the work of the Italian glass artist Narcissus Quagliata, who spent about four and a half years on the project. The glass was fabricated by the long-established Derix glass studios in Germany, with hand-made glass rondels from Murano set among the panels. Quagliata divided the composition into four great sectors devoted to water, earth, light and fire, through which human figures move in a cycle of birth, growth, glory, destruction and rebirth; he wanted travellers who glance up to find a place for dreaming in the middle of their journey. In 2015 the metro operator added a timed light-and-sound show that animates the glass at intervals.
Did you know? According to Taiwanese sources the Dome of Light is assembled from 1,252 windows, each made of two to nine panels containing between 3 and 100 pieces of glass.
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 are the most beautiful railway stations in Asia?
- On our list, Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Circle Line) (Russia) ranks first, followed by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (India) and Haydarpaşa railway station (Turkey).
- Which country has the most railway stations in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from India (1), Japan (1) and Malaysia (1).
- What was Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus called before?
- It was built as Victoria Terminus, named after Queen Victoria, and opened in 1888. It was renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in 1996 and took its current name in 2017.
- What is the Dome of Light?
- It is a large public artwork of coloured glass by the Italian-American artist Narcissus Quagliata, covering the concourse of Formosa Boulevard Station in Kaohsiung. It is often described as one of the largest glass artworks in the world.
- What inspired the Tsuzumi-mon gate at Kanazawa Station?
- Its twisted wooden pillars are modelled on the tsuzumi, a hand drum used in Noh theatre, a performing art long associated with Kanazawa.
- How many railway stations are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 6 railway stations in 6 countries. India has the most, with 1.