The Boise Depot: Spanish Towers and a Hundred-Year Wait for the Mainline
Near Boise, Idaho
The Boise Depot stands on a hill south of downtown with its ninety-six-foot Spanish Colonial Revival tower visible from most of the city. The train station is so beautiful, and so prominently sited, that it's easy to forget Boise almost didn't get a mainline railroad at all.
When the Union Pacific pushed its Oregon Short Line through southern Idaho in the eighteen eighties, it bypassed Boise entirely. The main tracks ran through Nampa and Kuna, twenty miles south, and trains reached Boise only by backing up a branch line, a humiliation for a capital city. Boiseans lobbied for decades to get their own mainline connection.
They finally got it in nineteen twenty-five. The Union Pacific opened a direct mainline through Boise on April sixteenth, and to mark the occasion commissioned a landmark depot. The architects were the New York firm of Carrere, Hastings, Shreve and Lamb, who called their creation the most beautiful railroad station in the West. The style is Spanish Colonial Revival, chosen to match the Mediterranean feeling that was fashionable in western cities in the nineteen twenties. Stucco walls, terracotta roof tiles, curved gables, pierced arches, and that soaring campanile tower.
Inside, the waiting room was built for three hundred people. The wooden trusses overhead are carved and painted. The whole thing was designed to signal arrival, to tell passengers stepping off the train that they'd reached somewhere significant.
Union Pacific's own named trains stopped serving the depot in nineteen seventy one, though Amtrak kept routing its Pioneer through the building all the way until nineteen ninety seven. Morrison Knudsen Corporation bought it and spent three and a half million dollars restoring it. The city of Boise took over in nineteen ninety-six. Today the tower is open for tours and the building hosts weddings, events, and the occasional nostalgia for a time when you arrived somewhere by train.
