Ogden Union Station: Junction of a Continent
Near Ogden, Utah
When the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in eighteen sixty-nine at Promontory Summit, about fifty miles north of here, the question of where to locate the great western junction was settled quickly: Ogden won the contract. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific would meet in this city, and for the next half century Ogden would operate the largest rail switching terminal west of the Mississippi.
The first station went up in eighteen sixty-nine, a modest structure for what would become enormous traffic. By eighteen eighty-nine a far grander Romanesque Revival building replaced it, a brick landmark with a clock tower, thirty-three hotel rooms, a restaurant, and a barbershop, all serving the streams of passengers crossing the continent. Ogden was not a destination so much as a transfer point, and that made it one of the most consequential towns in the American West.
Then on a winter night in nineteen twenty-three, a fire started in a hotel room and gutted the station from the inside. The exterior walls and clock tower were left too weakened to save, and the decision was made to build new.
The replacement that opened on November twenty-second, nineteen twenty-four, was something altogether different. The father-and-son architectural team of John and Donald Parkinson designed a Spanish Colonial Revival building, cream-colored stucco, red tile roof, arched entryways, and a gracious interior with a waiting room finished in warm plaster and tile. The Parkinsons had already designed railroad depots in Nevada and California; they knew how to make a railroad gateway feel like an arrival. Fifteen years later, they would go on to design Union Station in Los Angeles.
For fifty years the station was Ogden's commercial and social center. Soldiers shipped out from its platforms during two world wars. The transcontinental passenger trains slowed, stopped, changed crews, and rolled west again. Then the long decline of passenger rail through the nineteen sixties and seventies emptied the building.
Today Union Station houses museums, railroads, firearms, natural history, and the cars that replaced the trains, all preserved inside the shell of a building that once stood at the center of a continent in motion.
