Union Station (Washington, D.C.)

Washington Union Station is a train station and leisure destination visited by 32 million people each year in the center of Washington, D.C. The train station is served by Amtrak, MARC and Virginia Railway Express commuter rail services as well as by Washington Metro subway trains and local buses. It opened in 1907 and at its height during World War II some 200,000 people passed through it every day. It is also the headquarters for Amtrak.^[2]

Description

Today Union Station is again one of Washington's busiest and best-known places, visited by 32 million people each year and has many shops, cafes and restaurants.

Passenger services include Amtrak’s high-speed Acela Express, Northeast Regional, and several of Amtrak's long-distance sleeper trains (including, among others, the Capitol Limited, Crescent, Palmetto, and Silver Service trains); the MARC and VRE commuter railways, linking Washington to Maryland and Virginia, respectively; and the Washington Metro Red Line. From Union Station Amtrak also operates long-distance service to the southeast and midwest, including many intermediate stops to destinations like Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami. Approximately 12,500 passengers boarded or detrained Amtrak services daily in FY2010.

The station is at the southern end of the Northeast Corridor, an electrified rail line extending north through major cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.

The track area of the station is divided into upper and lower levels. On the Upper Level are tracks 7–20 which are used by MARC (weekdays) and Amtrak Acela Express, as well as a few Amtrak Regional trains. The Lower Level consists of tracks 22–29 and is used by all southbound service, including all VRE trains, via the First Street Tunnel, as well as some northbound Amtrak services during the week. The D.C. Metrorail Red Line station is located underground at the western side of the building, and is the busiest station in the entire Metro system.

Union Station has a mix of terminal and through tracks. Most of the upper level platforms, used mainly by MARC, Amtrak's Northeast Regional trains, and Acela, are terminal, with trains only arriving from and departing to the north. Several of the lower level tracks are through platforms, and are mainly used by VRE, as well as most of Amtrak's long-distance trains and Northeast Regional trains operating to/from Newport News, and Lynchburg.

Architecture

Architect Daniel Burnham, assisted by Pierce Anderson, was inspired by a number of different architectural styles. Classical elements included the Arch of Constantine (exterior, main facade) and the great vaulted spaces of the Baths of Diocletian (interior); prominent siting at the intersection of two of Pierre L'Enfant's avenues, with an orientation that faced the United States Capitol just five blocks away; a massive scale, including a facade stretching more than 600 feet and a waiting room ceiling 96 feet above the floor; stone inscriptions and allegorical sculpture in the Beaux-Arts style; expensive materials such as marble, gold leaf, and white granite from a previously unused quarry.

In the Attic block, above the main cornice of the central block, stand six colossal statues (modeled on the Dacian prisoners of the Arch of Constantine) designed by Louis St. Gaudens. These are entitled "The Progress of Railroading" and their iconography expresses the confident enthusiasm of the American Renaissance movement: Prometheus (for Fire), Thales (for Electricity), Themis (for Freedom and Justice), Apollo (for Imagination and Inspiration), Ceres (for Agriculture) and Archimedes (for Mechanics). The substitution of Agriculture for Commerce in a railroad station iconography vividly conveys the power of a specifically American lobbying bloc. St. Gaudens also created the 26 centurions for the station's main hall.

Burnham drew upon a tradition, launched with the 1837 Euston railway station in London, of treating the entrance to a major terminal as a triumphal arch. He linked the monumental end pavilions with long arcades enclosing loggias in a long series of bays that were vaulted with the lightweight fireproof Guastavino tiles favored by American Beaux-Arts architects. The final aspect owed much to the Court of Heroes at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, where Burnham had been coordinating architect. The setting of Union Station’s facade at the focus of converging avenues in a park-like green setting is one of the few executed achievements of the City Beautiful movement: elite city planning that was based on the "goosefoot" (patte d'oie) of formal garden plans made by Baroque designers such as André Le Nôtre. The radiating avenues can be seen in the satellite view (illustration, left).

The station held a full range of dining rooms and other services, including barber shops and a mortuary. Union Station was equipped with a presidential suite which is now occupied by a restaurant.

History

Planning

When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad announced in 1901 that they planned to build a new terminal, people in the city celebrated for two reasons:

• The decision meant that both the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would soon remove their trackwork and terminals from the National Mall. Though changes there appeared only gradually, the consolidation of the depots allowed the creation of the Mall as it appears today.
• The plans to bring all the city's railroads under one roof promised that Washington would finally have a station both large enough to handle large crowds and impressive enough to befit the city's role as the federal capital.

Operation

Union Station opened on October 27, 1907, with the arrival of a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad passenger train from Pittsburgh. The terminal quickly became the portal to the Capitol. At no time was it busier than during World War II, when as many as 200,000 people passed through in a single day.

For most of its existence, Union Station served as a hub, with service of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, and Southern Railway. The Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad provided a link to Richmond, Virginia, about 100 miles to the south, where major north-south lines of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and Seaboard Air Line Railroad provided service to the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.

Decline

In 1967, the chairman of the Civil Service Commission expressed interest in using Union Station as a visitor center during the upcoming Bicentennial celebrations. Funding for this was collected over the next six years, and the reconstruction of the station included outfitting the Main Hall with a recessed pit to display a slide show presentation. This was officially the PAVE (Primary Audio-Visual Experience), but was sarcastically referred to as "the Pit." The entire project was completed, save for the parking garage, and opening ceremonies were held on Independence Day 1976. Due to a lack of publicity and convenient parking, the National Visitor Center was never popular. Following a 1977 General Accounting Office report indicating Union Station was in danger of imminent structural collapse, the National Park Service closed the presentation in "the Pit" on October 28, 1978.

Restoration

As a result of the Redevelopment Act of 1981, Union Station was closed for restoration and refurbishing. Mold was growing in the leaking ceiling of the Main Hall, and the carpet laid out for an Inauguration Day celebration was full of cigarette-burned holes. In 1988, Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole, awarded $70 million to the restoration effort. "The Pit" was transformed into a new basement level, and the Main Hall floor was refitted with marble. While installing new HVAC systems, crews discovered antique items in shafts that had not been opened since the building's creation. The decorative elements of the station were also restored.

The station reopened in its present form in 1988. The former “Pit” area was replaced with an AMC movie theater (later Phoenix Theatres, closed October 12, 2009, to be replaced with additional restaurants) and a large food court in the former baggage-mail level. The food court still retains the original arches under which the trains were parked as well as the track numbers on those arches. A variety of shops opened along the Concourse and Main Hall, and a new Amtrak terminal at the back behind the original Concourse. In 1994, the passenger concourse was renamed to honor W. Graham Claytor, Jr., who served as Amtrak's president from 1982 to 1993.

On August 1, 2011, John Porcari, the United States Deputy Secretary of Transportation, announced that Union Station would begin serving intercity buses operated by Greyhound Lines, BoltBus, Megabus and Washington Deluxe later that year from a new bus facility in the station's parking garage.^[3] By November 15, 2011, BoltBus, Megabus and Washington Deluxe were operating from the new facility.^[4]

The Ivy City Yard, just north of Union Station, houses a large Amtrak maintenance facility. This includes the new maintenance facility for the Acela high speed train sets. Amtrak also does contract work for MARC's electric locomotives. Metro's Brentwood maintenance facility is also located in the southwest corner of the Ivy City Yard. Riding the Metro Red Line between Union Station and Rhode Island Avenue Station gives you a great aerial view of the south end of the Ivy City yard.

Union Station is owned by the non-profit Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, but an 84-year lease of the property is held by New York-based Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation and managed by Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle. It houses the headquarters of Amtrak and carries the IATA airport code of ZWU.^[5]

Incidents

1953 overrun

On the morning of January 15, 1953, the Pennsylvania Railroad's Federal, the overnight train from Boston, crashed into the station. When the engineer tried to apply the trainline brakes two miles out of the platforms, he discovered that he only had engine brakes. He radioed a warning ahead, and the concourse was cleared as the train coasted downhill into track 16. The GG1 locomotive, No. 4876, hit the bumper post at about 25 miles per hour, jumped onto the platform, destroyed the stationmaster’s office at the end of the track, took out a newsstand, and was on its way to crashing through the wall into the Great Hall. Just then, the floor of the terminal, having never been designed to carry the weight of a locomotive, gave way, dropping the engine into the basement. The 447,000-pound electric locomotive fell into about the center of what is now the food court. Remarkably, no one was killed, and passengers in the rear cars thought that they had only had a rough stop. An investigation revealed that an anglecock on the brakeline had been closed, probably by an icicle knocked from an overhead bridge. The accident inspired the finale of the 1976 film Silver Streak. The durable design of the GG1 made its damage repairable, and it was soon back in service after being hauled away in pieces to the PRR's main shops in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Before the latter action was undertaken, however, the GG1 and the hole it made were temporarily planked over and hidden from view due to the imminent inauguration of General Dwight D. Eisenhower as the thirty-fourth President of the United States.

Union Station in the media

Washington’s Union Station has featured as a location in numerous movies, not all as memorable as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Others include Strangers on a Train (film), Hannibal, The Recruit, Along Came a Spider, Collateral Damage, The Sentinel, My Fellow Americans, and Wedding Crashers.

Several episodes of the television series The West Wing used Union Station as a setting. Union Station was used as a setting for one episode of the CBS military courtroom drama JAG, and was frequently mentioned in that series as being a landmark located to the south of the main character Harmon Rabb's apartment building.

The station has also been the subject of multiple books. The 128-page Union Station: A Decorative History of Washington’s Grand Terminal by Carol Highsmith and Ted Landphair tells the complete history of the station through text and photographs. Presidential daughter Margaret Truman’s Capital Crimes mystery series includes a Murder at Union Station novel.

Gallery

See also

• List of Union stations
• Union Station (Washington Metro)
• Columbus Fountain located in front of Union Station.
• Washington Terminal Company
• American Legion Freedom Bell located in front of Union Station.

References

External links

• Official Site
• History of Union Station
• Union Station
• Renovation of Union Station
• National Railway Historical Society: brief history
• NIHS Wreck of the Federal Express

• Amtrak – Stations – Washington Union Station
• Virginia Railway Express
• WMATA Metro Bus Connections and Evacuations
• Station Building from Google Maps Street View