Hagen-Vorhalle station
Hagen-Vorhalle station is a large marshalling yard of national importance and a small passenger station for local services in the Hagen district of Vorhalle in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was opened in its present form in 1910 in and is one of the nine major marshalling yards in Germany and a key element of the 200X program to upgrade Germany's freight infrastructure initiated in 2006 by the former Railion Deutschland AG (now DB Schenker Rail). The station is located on the Ruhr Valley Railway and the Elberfeld–Dortmund line. The station was opened on the 9 March 1849 as Herdecke station and successively renamed as Herdecke Süd, Herdecke-Vorhalle and Vorhalle. It was renamed as Hagen-Vorhalle in the early 1950s. Marshalling yard The yard has eleven arrival tracks, two hump tracks and 40 classification tracks up to 920 m long. The freight wagons or sets of wagons are run over the hump and then retarded by a series of automatic retarders and finally pushed together for coupling. The wagons are then coupled together with their brake hoses and the brakes are tested by a remote-controlled brake test system. The entire marshalling operation is automatically controlled by a central electronic