I was curious about what everyones past & present, best and worst railway union station experience was & why?
Mine is,
Best - Los Angeles Union Station, original design, great layout and easy access to trains. Clean.
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Worst - Fredericksburg, Va., multi level station with freight trains passing by you within feet at who knows what speed their going at, while your hoping a freight car doesn’t jump the track right where your standing while your waiting for Amtrak or the VRE… dirty, noisy and very unsafe.
Perhaps a comment of most memorable…Long ago, passing thru {the great}, Penn Station NYC both ways, over a weekend.
Another in a small town. Ligonier, Pa. Many, many years ago witnessing action in the small town depot, sorry not a union station {and a beautiful building and setting}, daily while visiting there in the Summer.
Don’t recall any exceptionally bad experiences in any…I’ll just say, the ambience in Chicago Union {many years ago}, was dark and dreary, but then Uncle Sam was sending me on a long western journey and beyond.
My worst is also in New York. The new Penn Station feels like an underground mall in need of renovation. While the Amtrak concourse feels like it might have been nice at one time (it has soaring ceilings that are…maybe two stories high?), the rest of the station is very well used (read: run-down) and doesn’t give any grandour to the station unlike Grand Central and the OLD Penn Station.
Lots of good ones-Grand Central, Union-Wash DC, Union-LA, Union-St. Louis
Memorable-Jacksonville, FL -years ago my parents & I arrived during a storm and all the lights were out in the station, they had baggage carts lighting up the walkways. We had ice cream in the cafe by candlelight. Lake Alfred, FL-stepping from one train to another in the middle of the night. I don’t remember even seeing a station. We were on our way to see Dad’s cousin in Punta Gorda, FL and because of travel on a pass, it was an adventure. Carbondale, IL wasn’t too clean, we saw bugs in the bathroom.
Had to spend a long day in Buffalo, NY station because the train from Niagara Falls arrived about noon and our train back to St. Lou didn’t come thru until almost midnight. The station was large and nice, but it got boring after a while. We ate lunch in the cafe and when we came in for supper, one of the waitresses said “are you still here?” Another adventure on a pass. But what the heck, it was FREE.
Chicago Union Station, December 24, 1971. During the summer and fall of that year I lived and worked as a desert rat in southern California. Towards the end of my assignment, I caught the last Super Chief out of Barstow that would get me home in time for Christmas Eve. The train was crowded, of course, but it kept pretty much to schedule and arrived Chicago on-time. Riding the last Pullman, I had a long walk up the station platform shrouded most of the way in clouds of escaping steam from the adjacent passenger cars. As I neared the top end of the platform, the air cleared and standing there were my dad and mom, my sister, and my maternal grandmother. I vividly remember the expression of warm recognition I saw in my father’s face; but even more dramatic was the way my grandmother reacted when she first saw me. She just burst into tears, threw her arms up in the air, and came running down the platform to give me a hug. It was the most emotional Christmastime moment of my adult life.
I have a theory, though, about my grandmother’s reaction at that moment: what she didn’t see was me. In her mind’s eye it was 1918 once again and what she saw was her long lost brother, whom she loved so much, coming home at last from The Great War (WW1).
Beyond that moment, GCT, LAUPT, plus Chicago, Denver, Portland, and Pueblo Union Stations have provided me many pleasant hours of entertainment.
THE WORST UNION STATION EXPERIENCE
actually happened in the Amtrak era. About 12-to-15 years ago I was working in downtown Saint Louis.&
I forwarded the link to my wife, and she really appreciated it, saying it brought memories back to her–she lived in NYC for eleven years, back in the fifties-early sixties, and she would go up to Bronxville from time to time to visit her father and stepmother. Two years ago, we went up to Wassaic and back on the Harlem line, and she said that the station just did not look as it did when she lived in NYC.
We had a bad experience at Penn Station this spring. We came in from Rensselaer, and were taking the next train down to Washington. When we got off the train, a redcap brought a wheelchair for her, took our baggage on his cart (I was pushing the wheelchair)–and then set our baggage off so he could take someone else’s baggage, and told us it would be a while before he would be back. We waited and waited, and the conductor of the train we came in on called and called to get another redcap down to the track to help us. At last, another redcap came down, took us to the ClubAcela (I had passes), and promised to be back to take us to our next train. He did get us on board.
On the same trip, we went into Vancouver from Seattle, and then on east. After we cleared customs, I took our large suitcase over to be checked (I knew it would not fit into our drawing room), I was asked about carry-on baggage, and was told that it would be placed in our room on board. I accepted the offer. We stopped over in Jasper, and when we returned to the station to continue east, not only was the large suitcase checked, but the carry-on baggage was taken care of as well–and there are no redcaps at either station.
In Montreal, My wife was treated to a repetition of a new experience she had two years ago: up the escalat