The estimate of migrants coming mostly on trains from Hungary via Austria to the southern city of Munich was “10,000 plus”, said Upper Bavaria district president Christoph Hillenbrand.

Police were highly visible, with dozens appearing on the platforms where refugees’ trains pulled in to shield them from onlookers and keep them in line.

The new arrivals were medically screened, fed, watered and counted out of sight of other passengers before being bused to locations around the city.

Many said they were from Syria, while others were from Afghanistan and Iraq.

A similar number of people was expected to arrive in Munich late on Sunday.

In Munich’s railway station hall, large tables offered clothes and food to the new arrivals, staffed by some 90 helpers, including several Arabic speakers, working four-hour shifts.

German interior ministry spokesman Harald Neymanns said Berlin’s decision to open its borders to Syrians was an exceptional case for humani-tarian reasons. They can only watch helplessly as Chancellor Merkel lays out the red carpet for the Syrian people and yet their plight goes unanswered.

Seated beside him on the train station’s concrete pavement were his 33-year-old wife, Baneaa, in her lap 1-month-old daughter Dahab, and beside them four other children aged 5 to 12, all smiling beside a cart containing green and red apples.

D’Agata says the train ride from Austria looked like a giant migrant slumber party; the exhaustion from weeks of sleeping on roadsides and in makeshift refugee camps and train stations had finally set in.

Austria said it planned to end the emergency measures allowing thousands of refugees to cross over from Hungary freely.

The Austrian state railway company OeBB estimated it would have transported 7,500 migrants before stopping services for the night.

Hungary insisted the bus rides were a one-off as hundreds more people gathered in Budapest, in what has become Europe’s most acute refugee crisis since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

Munich has cranked up a formidable administrative machine to meet a tidal wave of refugees, ferrying more than 15,000 exhausted human souls through its central station to shelter by Sunday evening while still keeping the trains running on time.