is the Hauptbahnhof for the city of Mainz

Mainz

Mainz under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire...

 in the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 state of Rhineland-Palatinate

Rhineland-Palatinate

Rhineland-Palatinate is one of the 16 states of the Federal Republic of Germany. It has an area of and about four million inhabitants. The capital is Mainz. English speakers also commonly refer to the state by its German name, Rheinland-Pfalz ....

. It is used by about 80,000 travellers and visitors each day and is therefore one of the busiest 21 stations in Germany. The station was a trial area for a CCTV scheme using automated face recognition

Facial recognition system

A facial recognition system is a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source...

.
The current station was built as a central station from 1882 to 1884 according to the plans of Philipp Johann Berdellé (1838–1903) as part of the expansion of the city after the Franco-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

.
Under the Rheinschifffahrtsakte (Rhine navigation treaty) of 1831, Mainz lost its right to impose a stapelrecht (pile right, a medieval right apparently first granted by Charlemagne

Charlemagne

Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...

 to some cities, including Mainz, to require river traders to unload goods in its marketplace for a specified number of days and offer them for sale or make payment in lieu) and thus its trading port and its high tariffs could be avoided.