During a trip from Madison through Milwaukee and down to Chicago today I stopped at Sturtevant to see what the site of the old Amtrak (formerly Milwaukee Road) passenger station looked like…well, they have since torn down the old station and replaced it with a brand spanking new prefab building that CP Rail uses as the Sturtevant Yard Office and Engineering Operations Center. This new building is in exactly the same spot as the former passenger station and doesn’t look all bad IMHO…how do the rest of the area railfans feel about this?
Is it another “Amshack?”
Sad if it is.
The old Sturtevant depot still exists, but it was moved last year. I don’t remember exactly where they moved the old depot to, but it isn’t in Sturtevant. It is supposed to be restored and put on the same site as some old town hall.
No, it’s actually a nice, newly built station. An oddity about it is that, even though the track is on an embankment, access to the far platform is via a bridge rather than a tunnel. I can understand that a bridge was far easier to install than digging under a busy double tracked main line but you end up so high that it’s not a place I’d like to be in an approaching thunderstorm…
In addition to the new Sturtevant station, Milwaukee has the Mitchell Airport station and downtown Intermodal Station, Glenview is not all that old and appears well kept and, finally, Union Station in Chicago was renovated in 1991. So, over the last twenty years (and mostly the last ten) every station on the Hiawatha route has been built or extensively renovated.
I think that the new station captures a bit of the feel of the old with the “witch hat” roof lines. Much as I enjoyed hanging out at the old station taking photos, it’s hard to argue that the new station isn’t a lot nicer. The old station hadn’t been very well maintained and was really showing its age.
Old station
New Station
http://www.fuzzyworld3.com/railroad/cp01/ks-1504-sturtevantnewdepot.jpg
…The new one sure looks like a very nice structure. But that overhead passage across the tracks…Must be a lot of steps, or is there an elevator at each end…?
The old depot was moved to Caledonia.
http://www.journaltimes.com/news/local/01de2c12-c249-11de-bf56-001cc4c002e0.html
The old depot was at MP 61.9 in the middle of the Wye. The new station is at MP 63.0 just south of the Hwy 20 underpass.
When originally proposed, it was to have a tunnel under the tracks but the city would not agree to the time constraints imposed on construction that required one track to be in service at all times and the work to be done over a single weekend. Tricky, but not impossible.
You see what finally got built several years and design iterations later.