Riding the Rails
Monday, September 05, 2005

If you’re reading this magazine, chances are that you rode on a train of some sort recently, or that you are about to ride on a train. To do this, you would have passed through a train station, the ‘intermodal interface’ between our human legs and the steel rails.

Trains have always evoked imagery of a romantic method of travel: from the glamorous cognescenti who wined and dined on the Orient Express to Harper’s Bazaar singing of ‘dinner in the diner / nothing could be finer’ on a train heading towards Chattanooga. While the mention of train stations have spawned pop music imagery like the Monkees singing of ‘coffee flavored kisses’ while waiting for the last train to Clarksville; architecturally, the mention of a train station usually evokes images of great urban palaces like the floating vaults of London’s Paddington Station to the cavernous waiting room of, well, Union Station in Chicago. I carry all sorts of baggage about this topic, I lived and grew up in a train station.

Many bemoan that train stations aren’t what they used to be. The last really great train stations built in North America are located in Los Angeles (1939), Cincinnati (1931) and Buffalo (1929). While one may argue that Gare Central in Montreal is a large train station built in the late 1950’s, I would submit that it really is a basement appendage to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Another basement appendage is the current Pennsylvania Station in New York City. I would submit various explanations for this design and construction trend.

My theory is that the sort of trappings one gets to spend waiting for their trip will be directly variable to length of trip and the number of people traveling. In recent times, we’ve added a component of public money, for which I’ll give my latent opinions at the end of this article. The great cavernous halls that come to mind as train stations have all been long distance train stations. Even places like the old Chicago and Northwestern Station mixed long distance trains with its preponderance of commuter traffic, allowing my theory to bring forth beautifully graceful space. When waiting for a lengthy trip, people are apt to want to spend more time than they would say’ to hop an El train to travel to their 930 appointment. The current NW station, renamed the Olgivie Transportation Center, handles a major influx of commuters who have no time to wait. Personally, I quite like the new NW station, yet it lacks space because no one wants to wait for their train, which led to a much less grandly scaled space than its predecessor. If we feel no need to wait and not the traffic volume, there’s not a lot of reason to provide a space similar to Grand Central Station in New York.

As for the public funding component: a painfully obvious comparison would be between a major airport terminal and an inner city bus depot: one receives major amounts of public funding while the other receives virtually none. The bus depot illustrates just how much of our ticket price we – the traveling public – are willing to pay for terminal facilities as part of our ticket price, despite several airlines may charging fares that are competitive to bus fares. One may argue that railways get lots of public subsidies, they ought to be required to build palatial transportation depots. Those subsidies tend to go towards things like track rentals and improvements, since most railway traffic these days is freight, not passenger. Anyone who experienced the spine rattling ride the Empire Builder used to take around Wisconsin Dells knows exactly what I’m referring to. As for public moneys going towards station facilities; look no farther than St. Louis, where Amtrak has moved into its second ‘temporary’ terminal with an ambience no greater than a double wide mobile home, while the original train station banished trains to stationery museum pieces and was transformed into a breathtaking major public festival market and hotel.

Many times, we build our buildings on expectations the potential of future growth. As a society, we seem to be expressing more hope in the airline industry than in trains. It’s not that trains are old fashioned or anything, one quick look at any one of a number of snazzy new European train stations will say otherwise. Quite pragmatically: for train travel, the future potential we seem to embrace these days in this country tends to be more of a public transit – rapid transit and commuter train sort of variety. To build great halls for trains isn’t making economic sense, though one may argue that this isn’t a level playing field argument when compared to other methods of transportation.

Me, I have better stories than anything the Monkees or Carole King could conjur: One afternoon while I was in second grade, who happened to ‘pop in’ to our station for a quick visit: none other than Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and his wife, Olive. I’m dating myself recounting this story, but I’ll bet you’ll need to research some history texts to pin down a date, so I’ve bought myself running time. Anyway; there they were, Mr. & Mrs. Diefenbaker, on the back observation deck of their train car, waving at the crowd that was beginning to collect on the platform. My father was precoccupied with crowd control, my mother was beside herself wondering what the perfect hostess was to do with 1500 of her closest friends, and the Prime Minister of Canada. The only person with a better memory than John was Olive. Mrs. Diefenbaker picked my teacher’s mother out of the crowd as an old friend, and asked her on board. Mrs. South, somewhere in her 90’s, waved at the crowd, the Diefenbaker’s offered her a ride down the line where they would put her up in a hotel overnight, and send her back to town in the morning on the Budd car. She thought it was thrilling. Apparently, they had opportunity to do this at every town they stopped at, and everyone on the train that they had collected seemed to know each other, but hadn’t seen any of the others in decades. The train left the platform as the crowd cheered, on its way to Lethbridge.

For trains, as in politics, it was a different world.

Darrel Babuk, AIA, MRAIC, LEED AP, is an Architect, and a noted speaker and writer on issues combining architecture & transportation. He is a Senior Associate at DLK Civic Design in Chicago, Illinois, and works with clients in their Transportation and Transit Planning department.