Union Station (Pittsburgh)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pittsburgh

Station statistics
Address	1100 Liberty Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15222
Lines	Capitol Limited, Pennsylvanian
Other information
Passengers (2006)	118,708 7.2%
Code	PGH
Owned by	Amtrak

Union Station or Pennsylvania Station is a historical train station at Grant Street and Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unlike many union stations built in the US to serve the needs of more than one railroad, this facility connected the Pennsylvania Railroad with several subsidiary lines; for that reason it was renamed in 1912 to match other Pennsylvania Stations.

The station building was designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and built 1898–1903. The materials were a grayish-brown terra cotta that looked like brownstone, and brick. The project required a tall railroad hotel to be incorporated in the overall design. Though Burnham is regarded more as a planner and organizer rather than a designer of details, which were left to draftsmen like Peter Joseph Weber, the most extraordinary feature of the monumental train station is his: the rotunda with corner pavilions. At street level the rotunda sheltered turning spaces for carriages beneath wide low vaulted spaces that owed little to any historicist style. Above, the rotunda sheltered passengers in a spectacular waiting room. Burnham's firm went on to complete more than a dozen projects in Pittsburgh, some on quite prominent sites.

The restoration of Union Station in the mid-1980s converted some concourse space into an expanded entrance to the former railroad hotel, now an apartment building; the main space was restored and the paint cleaned off the great central skylight.

Union Station continues to serve as a train station. It is the western terminus of Amtrak's Pennsylvanian route and is along the Capitol Limited route. For getting to and from Pittsburgh by train, the former route is considered to be far more useful, as the latter passes through Pittsburgh late at night and very early in the morning. In Federal Fiscal Year 2005, the station had 110,781 Amtrak boardings plus alightings, making it the 4th busiest Amtrak station in Pennsylvania as well as the busiest west of the Susquehanna River [1].

Its Amtrak station code is PGH.