Galesburg Station

The Galesburg station has been a railroad crossroads since eighteen fifty-four, when the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad drove through Knox County and put Galesburg on the main line between Chicago and the Mississippi. The current station building, a modest one-story structure from nineteen eighty-four, still sees Amtrak's California Zephyr and Southwest Chief pause here each day, making it one of the busier small-city stops in the Midwest. At its peak the Burlington railroad shops employed hundreds of Galesburg workers, and the round house and yards defined the south end of town for decades. Deindustrialization hit hard in the nineteen eighties and nineties, but the station itself endures as a working stop on two of Amtrak's storied long-distance routes.