The Chattanooga Choo-Choo: Song, Station, and Second Life

In the final months of nineteen oh nine, Southern Railway opened a train station in Chattanooga that was meant to announce something: this city mattered, and getting here should feel like an event.

Terminal Station was designed by New York architect Donn Barber in the Beaux-Arts style, the same grand idiom that was dressing up the great American passenger halls of that era. The exterior design won a prestigious award from the Beaux Arts Institute in Paris. The interior vaulted dome rose above the concourse like a cathedral. The station cost one and a half million dollars to build and welcomed as many as fifty trains a day during the peak years of rail travel.

The Glenn Miller Orchestra gave the station its permanent name in nineteen forty-one, when they recorded the novelty hit Chattanooga Choo Choo for the film Sun Valley Serenade. The song reached number one and stayed there for nine weeks. It became the first record ever certified gold, in nineteen forty-two. Suddenly a working railroad terminal in a medium-sized Tennessee city was a piece of American musical mythology.

Passenger rail declined after the Second World War, and in nineteen seventy, the last train pulled away from the platform. The station sat empty and faced demolition. A group of local investors, moved partly by the song and partly by a conviction that the building was too beautiful to lose, stepped in. They converted the terminal into a hotel and entertainment complex, which opened in nineteen seventy-three under the name the building had already been given by Glenn Miller.

The hotel still operates today, and several of its original sleeping cars have been converted into guest rooms on the old platform. Guests sleep where the trains once stood.