The First Station, 1888

The station is older than most of the buildings around it. It was begun in 1886 and opened on 5 October 1888, with the completion of the Tianjin-Tangshan railway, as the first railway station in the city. Its position on the north bank of the Hai River, at what is now 1 Xinwei Road, put the railway where the water transport already was, which is why the station and the riverfront grew into one another. The building that stands there now is much later, but the site's function has not changed in more than a century: this is still the point where travellers arriving by rail first meet the river.

The present station is a 1980s building with two memorable features. It was raised from 15 April 1987 and finished on 25 September 1988, and it has a 66-metre cylindrical clock tower facing the river. Inside, the dome carries a mural, Jingwei Filling the Sea by the painter Qin Zheng, which the sources call the largest dome mural in China; the subject is a myth in which a bird tries to fill the sea with twigs, an odd image for a transport hall and an apt one for a city that has spent centuries managing water. After rebuilding, the station's capacity rose from 46 to 95 pairs of trains a day and its waiting rooms held 10,000 people.

The station's name has moved around because the network around it grew. When the Jingpu railway and Tianjin West station opened in 1911, the old Tianjin station was renamed the East station, and the city acquired a pattern of three stations, north, east and west, that it still describes itself by. The station straddles two districts: the main structure is in Hebei, and the intercity north station house is in Chunhua Subdistrict of Hedong, with the Hedong district government running the integrated administration of the station area. Since 1 August 2008 it has been the terminus for the Beijing-Tianjin intercity high-speed trains, which is the latest stage of the same story.