Guide
The railway museum occupies about 45 square metres inside Sirkeci station, and it opened on 23 September 2005 to keep the objects the railway once used from disappearing. Roughly three hundred pieces are displayed, weighted towards the station itself: photographs and objects from units the railway has since closed, including its hospitals, its vocational lycée and its practical arts school; Ottoman papers, certificates, maps and project drawings, along with material from the Orient Express; and the vehicles, machinery and equipment of the working line.
The building around it is the reason to linger. The foundation stone was laid with ceremony on 11 February 1888 and the station opened on 3 November 1890, to designs by the German architect and engineer A. Jasmund, a Berlin graduate who had come to İstanbul to study eastern architecture and became a consulting architect to the palace of Abdülhamid II. Jasmund worked from one idea: that this was the point where west ended and east began, so the station should be built in an orientalist manner drawing on regional and national forms. Bands of brick run across the façades, the windows are pointed, and the wide central doorway recalls the stone portals of the Seljuks, with stained glass completing the effect. The base is granite, the elevations marble and stone brought from the Ardennes by way of Marseille; large tiled stoves were shipped from Austria for the waiting rooms, and three hundred gas lanterns lit the building.
Very little of its setting survives. In its early years the sea came up to the foot of the building and the ground stepped down to the water in terraces; there was a clock tower beside the central entrance, three large restaurants, and behind the station a beer garden and an open-air restaurant, with the grand restaurant on the clock-tower front reached by long marble stairs. Getting the line here cost the city a great deal: after the route from Yedikule reached Yenikapı there were long arguments about carrying it through the Topkapı palace gardens to Sarayburnu, and when Abdülaziz allowed it, Byzantine and Ottoman palaces and pavilions of incalculable value were demolished for the right of way and the shore lost its character. The line itself was the point of the building — the İstanbul–Edirne and Kırklareli–Alpullu sections, 337 kilometres of the 2,000-kilometre Oriental Railway concession granted in 1869, were finished and opened in 1888, which is how İstanbul was joined to the European network.
