The name Manggarai carries a dark etymology. The area takes its name from the Manggarai people of Flores, because this district in what was then Meester Cornelis served as a residence and marketplace for enslaved people brought from that eastern Indonesian island -- a grim trade that shaped the neighborhood's identity long before steel rails arrived. The Dutch colonial railway company Nederlands-Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij had laid the Batavia-Buitenzorg line through the area in 1873, but it took until 1914 for construction of a proper station to begin. The building was completed on 1 May 1918, though not entirely: World War I delayed shipments of roofing materials from Europe, so the station opened partially unfinished. Designed under the supervision of Van Grendt, who also built railway staff housing and a training school nearby, Manggarai replaced the older Meester Cornelis Station a few hundred meters to the south. Its tracks branched toward Jatinegara, Tanah Abang, and onward to Bandung, making it a critical junction from its first day of operation.

Walk into Manggarai's first-class waiting room and you step back to 1918. The room has remained essentially unchanged for over a century -- the same proportions, the same bones -- even as the station around it has been rebuilt, expanded, and modernized. This architectural stubbornness is deliberate. When the Directorate General of Railways began the station's massive expansion in 2017, the original east-side building was preserved as cultural heritage, a remnant of the Staatsspoorwegen era that once governed Java's rail network. The old colonial structure now sits alongside its replacement: a three-story modern building with curved rooflines, glass ceilings, and facades designed to flood the interior with natural light. The contrast is jarring and intentional -- a station that refuses to forget where it came from even as it rushes toward what it wants to become.

The ambition behind the Manggarai Central Station project is staggering. President Joko Widodo inaugurated the first phase on 26 December 2022, revealing a facility with three functional levels: lower platforms and tracks on the first floor, passenger amenities and commercial space on the second, and upper platforms on the third. The second phase, which began in 2023, aims to build elevated platforms above the Cikarang commuter line -- platforms that will serve long-distance intercity trains and effectively retire Gambir Station from that role. Manggarai already serves the Soekarno-Hatta Airport Rail Link, which began stopping here on 5 October 2019 after construction of a new west entrance building. When complete, the station will handle commuter rail, airport connections, and intercity routes under one roof, surrounded by a planned housing complex, commercial district, and five-star hotel. For a city of more than ten million people that moves largely by rail, the stakes are enormous.

Manggarai has generated its own folklore. Two Indonesian horror films -- Kereta Setan Manggarai and Kereta Hantu Manggarai -- use the station as their setting, drawing on urban legends of ghostly passengers and spectral trains that have circulated among commuters for years. The real-life dramas, however, have sometimes been stranger than fiction. In early 2023, after the station's renovation, the Directorate General of Railways installed a large embossed sign reading 'I Love DJKA' on the second floor -- a self-congratulatory accessory that commuters found baffling. Members of the Anak Kereta community, an organized group of frequent riders, pointed out that the agency was busy celebrating itself while escalators routinely malfunctioned and platform crowding remained a daily misery. The sign was removed on 22 February 2023, just weeks after its installation. The episode captured something essential about Manggarai: a station perpetually caught between grand ambition and the grinding reality of serving hundreds of thousands of passengers every day.