From: gurd@next04wor.wam.umd.edu (Daffy Duck)
Newsgroups: rec.railroad
Subject: Amtrak Stations
Date: 14 Sep 92 04:00:25 GMT
Reply-To: gurd@wam.umd.edu

The Washington Times, devoted almost its entire money section Today
(Sunday, Sept. 13) to Amtrak's stations and how they are helping the  
company increase ridership.  I have typed in the longest article for  
becuase it is very interesting.  

Copyright 1992, by News World Communications Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copied without Permission.

"On-time train revivals"
"RENOVATED STATIONS ARE FUELING THE REBIRTH OF RAILROADS"

By David Fields, The Washington Times

     When the nation's great railroad terminals were built in the early  
part of the century, their designers called them temples of  
transportation.
     By their size and scale alone, these stations, these shrines, said  
they were not just about arrivals and departures, but were monuments to  
the central role rails held in the life of the nations cities.
     "Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time ..... Theere  
was a superb fitness in the fact that one which held it better than all  
others should be railroad station,"  Thomas Wolfe wrote of New York's old  
Pennsylvania Station in "You Can't Go Home Again."
     "For here as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for one  
moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw  
their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the  
entire picture of human destiny.  Men came and went, they past and  
vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death  
..," he wrote of the station, which was the size of the nave of St.  
Peters Cathedral in the Vatican.
     But as the nation's cities and their transportation needs changed,  
the faithful deserted the railroads' temples, flocking instead to the  
airport, the bus terminal and, the most pagan of all, the highway.
     "These huge behemoths became horribly uneconomical," Don Pross,  
Amtrak's director of real estate development, said of the old terminals  
Amtrak inherited when it started operations in April 1971.
     "What made sense for us was to abandon" the huge facilties and build  
smalle one, he said.
     Now, with the rebirth of rail riding as an efficient,  
city-center-to-city center alternative to air travel, as a form of  
vacation travel, the temples are being cleansed and new generations of  
faithful are filling them.
     "What was considered ugly and Victorian 20 years ago is now becoming  
beautiful again,"  Scott Leonard of the National Association of Railroad  
Passengers said.
     Washington's Union Station was the first real success story, rebuilt  
and reopened in 1988 with funds from Amtrak, the federal government, local  
groups, and private developers.
     The building, which had decayed and crumbled, was completely  
renovated to include an array shops, resteraunts and theaters.
     Now a destination in itself, with as many people coming to shop and  
spend money as to catch a train, Union Station has become one of  
Washington's most popular retail areas.  Rail Ridership has also increased  
by 12 percent to 20 percent, said Luba Drahosz, Amtrak's manager of  
facitlities and capital planning.
     Amtrak paid $70 million -- less than half -- of the $160 million  
renovation; developers covered most of the cost.
     Now the Washington Union Station gospel is spreading:
     o Amtrak stations in Baltimore and Wilmington, Del., have been  
completetely redecorated and rehabilitated, even if retail offerings are  
sparse by comparison
     o In Philadelphia, Amtrak is in the finishing stages of restoring its  
main facility, the 30th. Street Station.
     o In Cincinnati, trains now fun in the 1930s-era terminal that had  
been without train service for decades.
     o From New York, where Amtrak's Penn Station hides in the basement of  
Madison Square Garden, may get a model station modeled after the glorious  
old one that was demolished in 1963.
     Inspiired by the increases in passenger traffic -- ridership is up by  
8 percent in Wilmington alone -- cities such as Richmond and Jacksonville,  
Fla., are thinking about closing their small, out-of-town terminals  
(dubbed "Amsheds" by employees) and returning to their in-town-terminals.
     In Philadelphia, a newly completed $100 renovation of 30th. Street  
Station is the first part of a larger plan:  Local groups including a  
real-estate developer and a civic group have proposed to build a small  
city over the 65-acre railcar yard just north of the station.
     Located next to the University of Pennsylvania and just across the  
Schuylkill River from downtown Philadelphia, the 30th. Street Station's  
planned shopping arcade with resteraunts should be successful, Ms. Drahosz  
said.
     "We hope that the retail outlets that go into places like  
Philadelphia's 30th. Street will be onew that serve the passengers,  
tenants, and the neighbors, perhaps," she said.
     "However, "we don't really expect these to be the same kind of retail  
success as [Washington] Union Station mostly because they just don't have  
the same amount of room,"  Amtrak spokeswoman Sue Martin said.
     The Philadelphia station has Amtrak's Metroliners, regular trains and  
long distance trains, as well as all of Philadelphia's commuter rail  
lines, including those that, until the recent opening of a tunnel, had to  
stop several miles accross town at the old Reading Terminal.
     Trains to and from the city's famous Main Line suburbs arrive on the  
uppler level, linking Center City, as they call the downtown there, with  
classy suburbs like Bryn Mawr, Haveford, and Radnor.  Because the tunnel  
now links these with other suburban routes to the east and north, 30th.  
Street is the city's transportation hub.
     And deep below 30th. Street, the city subway and trolley system runs,  
with some routes connecting directly into the station; others connect less  
than a block away.
     A key to any stations success as a retail mart, Ms. Martin said, is  
that it has other forms of transportation -- subways, rapid rail, city  
buses, long-distance buses and so.  Amtrak calls this "connectivity."
     In the Big Apple, Amtrak already connects with local commuter lines  
and rapid transit systems in the subterranean Penn Station in Madison  
Square Garden.
     But the current station in uninspiring, with low cielings, airless  
corridors and drab furniture -- a far cry from the Pennsylvania Station of  
1910, which was modeled on Rome's Baths of Caracalla and renowned for its  
sweeping spaces and vaulted, glass-covered ceilings.
     The original Pennsyslvania Station was tord down almost 30 years ago  
to make way for Madison Square Garden; Penn Station was installed in the  
lower levels of the arena.
     Today Amtrak hopes to return its New York station to its former glory  
by converting the soon-to-be-vacant, colonnaded post office across the  
street from Madison Square Garden into a rail terminal.
     The U.S. Postal Service is moving out of its General Post Office  
building on Eighth Avenue next year.  The post office was designed by the  
same architectural firm that that worked on the original Pennsylvania  
Station and has remarkable resemblances.
     The post office sits over the train tracks, making it feasible for  
tracks ot be diverted and a new Penn Station to built inside the post  
office.
     Expoloratory talks have begun on the change, but Ms. Drahosz said a  
move would not be likely in the next few years.
     Current logic would keep the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey  
Transit commuter trains and the PATH lines to New Jersey and the New York  
City Transit Authority subways in the station in Madison Square Garden.   
But Amtrak will build walkways between the tow facilities for connecting  
passengers.
     "So long as we have the ability to feed passengers to and from these  
other services, we can argue for the project,' said Ms. Drahosz.  "For  
Amtrak to have that kind of presence ithing the city would make a real  
difference."
     The cost of renovating the postal facility and rebuilding it as the  
newest Penn Station is somewhere around $300 million, which is far beyond  
Amtrak's budget, so the search is on for partners, Mr. Pross said.
     In Cincinnati, Amtrak has returned to the Union Terminal it abandoned  
20 years ago for a cinderblock "Amshed" on the edge of town.
     Cincinnati Union Terminal, an art-deco structure often cited as one  
of America's most beatiful train stations, was the first to be abandoned  
by Amtrak in 1972 -- even when it was one of the last passenger stations  
in the nation build before World War II and so is one of the newest.
     The huge, domelike structure reopened just a year ago as the home of  
the Cincinnati Historical Society and the city's natural history museum.   
Amtrak moved its track into a corner of the building just five months ago.
     Ms. Drahosz said it was too early to tell whether the change has  
affected ridership.  Cincinnati is visited by only six Amtrak trains a  
week (three in each direction), linking Washington and Chicago by way of  
Charlestown, W.Va. and Indianapolis.  And these stop late at night or  
early in the morning.
     Still the Cincinnati station is a landmark.
     So also are stations such as Chicago Union Station, "a proud but much  
misused lady," as Amtrak calls the 1925 terminal, which was refurbished  
for $32 million last October, and the Los Angeles Union Passenger  
Terminal, another meeting place for local and long-distance trains and  
rapid rail.  Both are centrally located to the revived downtowns they  
serve.
    "The old-timers knew what they were doing," Ms. Drahosz said. "We find  
time and time again, where buildings were torn down and we're looking for  
a site, that the old site is best."