The first station here was not here at all. The original Bogards' railway station opened in 1839 a few hundred meters north, on Place Rouppe in the lower City of Brussels - named for the old Bogards' convent that had stood on the site. It was a six-track terminus for the South Line, which ran to the industrial towns of Mons, Charleroi and La Louviere in the Sillon industriel before crossing the French border to reach Valenciennes. By the 1860s the station was strangled by its own success: too few tracks, too close to the city center. The authorities decided to demolish it. The unusual width of today's Avenue de Stalingrad - the broad boulevard running from Place Rouppe to the Small Ring - is the only visible trace, a reminder that train tracks once ran down its middle.

The replacement, designed by Auguste Payen in monumental neoclassical style, opened in 1869 a short distance south on the territory of Saint-Gilles. It was the second great Brussels train station of the 19th century - a triumphal-arch facade, a glass-and-iron train shed, a destination in itself. For eighty years it dominated the southern entrance to the city, while a separate Brussels-North station served everything heading toward Antwerp and the Netherlands. The two were joined only by an inadequate single track running along what is now the Small Ring. A law passed in 1909 mandated a direct connection between them. It would take half a century to build.

Payen's grand 1869 building was itself demolished in 1949 to make way for the North-South Connection - a six-kilometer cut through central Brussels that would for the first time link Brussels-South to Brussels-North as a through line rather than two terminuses. The current station was built on the same site between 1939 and 1954, in austere post-war functionalist style by architects Adrien and Yvan Blomme together with Fernand Petit. The tracks were raised six meters and extended onto a viaduct toward the city center. A covered street, the Rue Couverte, was tucked underneath with shops along it and trams running through.

The North-South Connection finally opened on 4 October 1952, and it changed everything about how trains worked in Belgium. Suddenly the three central stations - South, Central and North - were threaded onto a single line. Trains no longer had to reverse out of dead-end platforms. A passenger could in theory ride from Ostend all the way through Brussels to Liege without changing. The price was the destruction of much of the medieval Marolles district along the right-of-way, a cost that some in Brussels still hold against the planners of the 1940s. The architectural difference between the warm neoclassicism of Payen's old station and the cold concrete of the post-war replacement is, fairly or not, the difference most older Brussels residents remember.

What truly transformed Brussels-South was the arrival of international high-speed rail. The Eurostar started running through the Channel Tunnel from London Waterloo (later St Pancras) in 1994, with Brussels as one of its principal destinations. The Thalys network - now folded into the Eurostar brand - linked Brussels to Paris-Nord, Amsterdam, Cologne and Dusseldorf. The German ICE began running to Cologne and Frankfurt. The French TGV added southern routes down to Avignon, Marseille, Montpellier, and Perpignan. For travelers boarding here, Brussels-South is the moment Europe stops being a map and becomes a network.

Eurostar departures to the UK are unusual. Because the United Kingdom is not in the Schengen Area, UK-bound passengers clear Belgian Federal Police exit checks and UK Border Force entry checks inside the station, in dedicated departure halls, before boarding. Eurostar passengers continuing only to Lille or Calais-Frethun bypass those checks entirely and travel in a separate, security-monitored coach. The system is unique among continental train stations - the only place in Belgium where you legally leave the Schengen Area without leaving the country. The South Tower, the tallest building in Belgium, stands directly in front of the station's main exit and houses the Belgian Federal Pensions Service. From its upper floors on a clear day, you can see the Atomium to the north.

Step out the front doors of Brussels-South and you are in one of the most contested neighborhoods in the city. The area around the station - in Saint-Gilles and the neighboring Cureghem district of Anderlecht - has a rough reputation, and not undeservedly. Drug dealing, petty theft, and street prostitution have been persistent issues. Belgian newspapers regularly run articles about the gap between the gleaming international platforms inside and the streets that begin twenty meters from the exit doors. The city and the region have launched several urban renewal plans for what is called 'the Midi quarter,' with mixed results.

It is also one of the most genuinely cosmopolitan parts of Brussels. The Sunday market that sprawls along the railway viaducts is the largest in the city - Moroccan butchers, Congolese fish sellers, Turkish bakers, Polish grocers, all working through the morning under the trains rumbling overhead. The neighborhoods immediately east toward the Place de la Constitution are full of cheap restaurants and twenty-four-hour shops. To the west, the older streets of Saint-Gilles climb toward Hotel Hannon and the Art Nouveau district. The Midi station is what visitors see first of Brussels - a Eurostar arriving from London at noon spills its passengers into this whole reality at once. The contrast tells you something true about the city: an international capital, a former industrial backwater, and a working immigrant neighborhood all stacked on top of one another.

Beneath the railway concourse is another station entirely - the Gare du Midi metro station, opened on 2 October 1988. It serves the Brussels Metro's Lines 2 and 6 and the city's premetro (underground tram) lines 4 and 10. When it opened it was the terminus of Line 2 coming from Simonis; the line was extended west to Clemenceau in 1993, Delacroix in 2006, and Gare de l'Ouest in 2009. The 1993 premetro addition gave the station something rare in European transit systems: cross-platform interchange between metro and tram in both directions, so you can step off a metro and across the platform onto a tram going the same way.

The station handles more than two hundred thousand passengers a day. Trains from this station run as far as Eupen on the German border, Hasselt and Genk in Flemish Limburg, Luxembourg City via Arlon, and Knokke on the North Sea coast. A shuttle bus to Brussels-South Charleroi Airport - the low-cost airport forty kilometers south - leaves from Rue de France. International coach networks including BlaBlaBus run to Paris, Lille, Amsterdam and London. For most people passing through Brussels, this is the station that makes everything else possible. The Eurostar's blue-and-yellow rakes pull in, the platform announcements switch between French and Dutch and English, and the city opens out from the doors.