I really like the design of the London train terminals. In particular, where you actually board the trains tend to be vast open spaces with immense arched roofs, presumably so there was space for the smoke from the steam engines to get out. Paddington Station, for example. I think the main Paris station is similar, and I’m sure there are other ones too.
It seems like the stations built in America would have had a similar design, due to similar constraints and being built in a similar time period. But I haven’t seen any that have that same look. For instance, Grand Central Terminal in NYC has a grand waiting room, but the areas where you board the trains are dank pits of unpleasantness.
So are there any cool train stations in the United States? And if not, any ideas why?
San Diego has a neat one. I think it’s still there, one of the main features was the huge Santa Fe sign on the roof of the Spanish Mission style building.
Poughkeepsie New York, I recently read, on the Metro-North/Amtrak Hudson Valley line has been restored. I used that one a lot in the late seventies. It was an old stone building, almost like a small-scale Grand Central.
Well, I can tell you a little about why GCS has train platforms in the “dank pits.”
Midtown Manhattan real estate was (and is) too valuable to be used as RR yards. The tracks were submerged (and electrified) and the resultant air rights were sold – at a pretty penny – to real estate developers. Few realize that RR trains rumble underneath swank Park Avenue from GCS to 96th St. where they emerge out of the tunnels.
There is a current redesign plan for Penn Station in New York to incorporate the post office building as the central waiting room. This is years in the future though, and there will still be dank, dark pits for the reason that the real estate is expensive.
In the Eastern US, the train stations tend to be smack in the middle of the cities, which is a wonderful convenience for business travellers, but means that the trains must be sent underground (in dank pits). Some train stations have a combination of dank pits and open air trains (30th Street in Philadelphia comes to mind), but there are very few that are just expansive and lovely like the Brits or the French do.
I actually like the Lisbon train station the best myself. Currently there is an exhibition of train stations and train designs at the Art Institute in Chicago with new ideas and approaches modelled. Looks like St. Louis is in the process of building an extremely UGLY station at the moment (looks like it’s under a highway overpass, YEUCH!). However, San Francisco’s proposed station, though it also uses the dank pit model to some extent, looks like a rather multi-level design.
The old St. Louis Union Station (now a shopping mall) had a design like you describe. There was a large building with ticket counters, waiting room and a hotel and restaurant. Behind the building there were something like 16 sets of track, covered with a large, arched (and I can’t think of a better word) canopy to protect the passengers from the elements.
The “extremely UGLY” station JS Princeton referred to is actually the “temporary” facility built in 1978 when the old Union Station was closed. It is unaffectionately called “Amshack” by the natives.
There is one in Buffalo, NY which was in ruins when I lived there in the early 90’s. Website. Cincinnati has a gorgeous one, too. Tour here.
Basically, I’ve heard aviation quickly killed off trains as the economic way to travel in the US, and the stations went to ruin. That is not/was not the case in Europe.
The Southern Railway station in Chattanooga, Tennessee (now the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Holiday Inn hotel) had open-air tracks, with canopies over the passengner boarding platforms. Most of the track beds are now part of the formal gardens, with the concrete platforms still in place between them as sidewalks, though a few are still intact as locations for the Pullman car guest rooms (yes, you can actually stay the night in a genuine rail car), and one is used for a trolley that makes a circuit of the expansive hotel grounds (once the railyard area).
Atlanta, on the other hand, though a far more important railway center for most of its history, demolished its downtown station years ago, and has only Brookwood Station, which used to be a suburban stop, as its Amtrak station these days. Yet another reason I’d move to Chattanooga tomorrow if I could find a job there.
[hijack] rackensack, what sort of work are you interested in? Feel free to e-mail me if you prefer, but I grew up in Chattanooga, and still know a lot of people there, in various industries. If you’re serious about a possible move, I’ll see if I can help you out.
I kinda like Los Angeles Union Station myself, but I’m not sure when the original bits of it were built. It’s got some classic Spanish Style architecture, and while the long underground hallway leading to the platforms could use some prettying up, the platforms themselves are pretty airy.
