On 1 March 1862 the Bergisch-Märkische Eisenbahn opened a stretch of track between Bochum and Mülheim an der Ruhr and put a station on it called Essen BM. That station, in the half-timbered building at the foot of today's Hachestrasse, became the ancestor of the modern Hauptbahnhof. But it was not actually the first railway station in Essen. Sixteen years earlier, in 1846, the Cologne-Minden Railway Company had opened Berge-Borbeck, and the year after that the much larger Essen CME station on the same Duisburg-Dortmund trunk line. Essen had two competing railway companies, two competing terminals, and a city that was about to outgrow both of them faster than anyone could rebuild. By 1897 the half-timbered original was already past saving.

Between 1897 and 1905 the original Essen BM became Essen Hauptbahnhof, and Klingholz's new building rose in its place. The clock tower stood at the northwest corner with an illuminated dial. The waiting rooms were segregated by class: first and second class on red-brown and dark green tile, third and fourth on dark yellow brick, each according to what the railway thought they paid for. A two-span train shed by the August Klönne company of Dortmund covered the island platforms, 130 meters long and 10.7 meters high, hung from arch trusses on cast iron columns. The main hall had a square floor plan exactly 18.42 meters on a side. By December 1902 the station was finished. Behind everything was the iron skeleton, ready to absorb the slow downward pull of the mines.

In August 1914 the Hauptbahnhof became a junction in the war machine. Troop trains rolled west toward the Western Front, pausing only long enough for the soldiers to take refreshment on the platforms. The German Red Cross set up a help center inside the station to receive the wounded coming home. Two hospital trains commuted between the front and the Ruhr for the next four years. The first arrived at Essen on 30 August 1914 with three hundred wounded aboard, hauled by a Prussian P 8 locomotive in twenty-five wagons. By the end of the war around 150,000 wounded had passed through this concourse. On 25 July 1915 the Berlin sculptor Ludwig Nick erected a wooden statue called Schmied von Essen, the Blacksmith of Essen, on the station forecourt - a nail man, into which donors could hammer iron, silver or gold nails in exchange for war contributions. The statue itself was destroyed in an Allied raid on the Grugapark in the next war.

Between 27 October 1941 and 9 September 1943 nine trains left Essen Hauptbahnhof and the nearby Segeroth station carrying around 1,200 Jewish residents of Essen to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Central Europe. The first train took roughly two hundred people to the Lodz Ghetto. The other eight ran to Auschwitz and to Theresienstadt. Hardly anyone returned. These deportations were conducted openly, in broad daylight, in front of other passengers, the regular train traffic continuing on adjacent platforms without interruption. Surrounded by armed guards, families were loaded into freight cars while commuters walked past. There is no separate memorial inside the station for this; the station itself is the memorial. The fact that ordinary daylight trains ran on schedule that morning is, in many ways, the part the building still has to say about what happened here.

The station that survived the Second World War was almost completely rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s. Klingholz's Renaissance Revival hall is gone; what stands today is a postwar concourse on two levels, with shops and a travel center below and direct platform access above. Beneath it all is the Stadtbahn station with its trademark blue light. Around 400 trains pass through every day, making Essen the third busiest station in the Ruhr after Dortmund and Duisburg. Long-distance ICE and IC services call here, alongside RE and S-Bahn lines that fan out across the conurbation, including the unusual fifteen-minute RE14/S9 to Bottrop and Gladbeck. The east pedestrian tunnel, closed for lift installation, was reopened in October 2011. The Bahnhofsmission - the station charity - has been here since 1897, making it one of the oldest in Germany. A century and a half after the first wooden platform opened, the trains have not stopped.