The main railway station of Haarlem. Its name is simply Station Haarlem. The station, in use since 1842, is one of the oldest in the country. The original station building did not survive, it was replaced by a new building in Art Nouveau style at the beginning of the 20th century. This building opened in 1908 and is still in use today.
The photo shows the inside of the station, with platforms, rails and train shed.
Yesterday I showed you a photo from the exterior of the St Bavo Church. Today I have one of the interior. I took this photo through the choir screen in the direction of the organ.
The church organ you can see on the background was built in the 1730s, by the famous German organ builder Christiaan Müller. At the time, it was the largest church organ in the world. Many famous organists played on it, including Mozart (at the age of ten), Mendelssohn and Händel. It is also the organ that Herman Melville mentioned in Moby Dick, when he talked about the inside of the mouth of a whale: Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes?
