Union Station, 1924
Near Ogden, Utah
At two in the morning on a November night in nineteen twenty-three, the second Ogden Union Station caught fire. The building that replaced it, the one standing here now, opened eleven months later, on November twenty-second, nineteen twenty-four, to what the Deseret News called great fanfare.
The architects were John Parkinson and his son Donald, a father-and-son team based in Los Angeles who had already designed Los Angeles City Hall and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. For Ogden they produced a Spanish Colonial Revival building with Italian Renaissance flourishes: terra-cotta roof tiles, mosaic tile walls, brick grills above the entry lintels, carved archivolts at the entrance archways. The Grand Lobby at the center of the building rises fifty-six feet to the roof. It was designed for a specific effect: the immediate impression, on a traveler stepping off a transcontinental train, that this city had arrived.
And in the nineteen thirties and forties, it really had. During World War Two, as many as one hundred nineteen passenger trains passed through Ogden in a single twenty-four-hour period. The station handled presidents, ambassadors, military officers moving between the coasts. Sixty-two trains left every day, carrying soldiers and workers to California, to the Pacific ports, to the defense plants. The yard crews worked around the clock.
By the late nineteen fifties the trains had begun to thin. Interstate highways and commercial aviation were dismantling the railroads' passenger business. The junction that had built Ogden was unwinding. Amtrak took over the nation's passenger trains in nineteen seventy-one, and the last long distance passenger train left the station in nineteen ninety-seven.
The station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one, the same year Amtrak took over the nation's passenger trains. Today the building houses the Utah State Railroad Museum, the John M. Browning Firearms Museum, and a classic car collection. The Grand Lobby is available for private events. The fifty-six-foot ceiling has not changed.
