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St. Louis Union Station will get renovations
My wife and I were there in 1993. The Grand Hall was magnificent. I hope they haven’t destroyed its beauty by turning it into a bar. There were some very good restaurants at the time inside and outside on the concourse. By the way, stub end stations always confused me as to why they were built instead of pass through? Can someone enlighten me?
The ultimate solution is to restore Saint Louis Union Station as a functioning railway station. Turning the facility into an amusement park and lodge violates the station’s heritage. Tracks should be relaid to host passenger trains again. With the coming of HSR, a larger station than what Amtrak has beneath a freeway interchange will be needed. SLUS would be that larger station.
@Gerhardt_Kraken, stub stations offer passengers the convenience of ease and level access to trains at platforms from the concourse. At way stations (pass through stations), passengers must scale stairs to go above or beneath the tracks to access trains at other platforms… New York’s Penn Station is an example. In some way stations, passengers have to walk across tracks at their own peril.
Stub stations are commonly final stops and points of origin for most trains. Even for through trains, stub stations offer the benefit to passengers of not scaling stairs and crossing tracks as previously mentioned. Many stub stations feature wyes where platform tracks join to only a few tracks to form them. Trains are timmediately urned upon arrival when the wye is negotiated and the train reverses to the platform and concourse. Passengers safely disembark to the concourse and station without scaling stairs and walking on tracks.
If high speed were to require a larger station, the stub end configuration would not be a problem because a high speed train would likely have a locomotive (or cab car) at each end. If a train came in from Chicago, the crew could walk to the other end to continue to Kansas City. No back up moves are needed.
The number of cars on the Ferris wheel, 42, is exactly equal to the number of platform tracks in the station (after 10 were added to the original 32, as I recall). Coincidence or by design??
When I first visited St. Louis Union Station in the early 1990’s it had been beautifully restored with upscale shops and restaurants and a reasonably nice hotel at which I stayed. Later visits showed its inevitable decline as shoppers abandoned it for the suburbs after the novelty wore off and the former track area became the hangout of teenage gangs and homeless people harrassing the few remaining shoppers. Hopefully it can be restored to what it was in the early nineties. I doubt if it will ever see trains again as the backup moves would be too complicated and they annoy passengers. I hate to arrive on an already late Amtrajk train at Chicago Union Station and endure further delay by backing in. If the train heads in then the crew has to wye the train and this increases cost and may even require a totally seprate crew. Plus, the space used for the tracks is far more valuable for other uses than boarding and disembarking passengers. The current station is adequate for the present time according to friends that live in the St. Louis area. They are more concerned about parking than station ambiance.
On the contrary, Mr. McGuire, when a long distance train pulls into a stub station, it then requires a yard crew to turn it. If it backs in, it may well annoy the passengers but it saves yard crew time.
In the case of St. Louis, the only long distance train does not terminate there, so the road crew would have to either back it in or back it out. All the Illinois and Missouri corridor trains have cabs at both ends (or will in the next couple of years), so turning them is not a concern.
I don’t see track space as being a constraint in the current station, even if a couple of new round trips are added as part of the “high speed” improvements.
In all of my travels into and out of Chicago, I have ridden only one train that backed in–the one from New Orleans. It backs in because of the connection between the station tracks and the track to/from the South.
In some locations, geography and/or topography makes backing into a station necessary.
Lately, train 6 has been backing into Chicago. I don’t know why. Perhaps just to save yard crew time.
I recently read that St. Louis Union was not only one of the largest US stations, but also the world’s largest. Can anyone confirm that? In any event, with 42 tracks and its backing move ops, it was a fascinating place.
Is it so difficult to include a website address when it is mentioned in a story?
Turn part of it back and to the purpose for which it was built a transportation center.