Alexandria Union Station

The station at Alexandria, Virginia, is easy to underestimate. It sits modestly on a brick street, its brick facade slightly worn, trains slipping in and out on a schedule that has hardly changed in decades. But this building carries a history that runs through more than a century of American rail and American ambition.

Alexandria Union Station opened on September fifteenth, nineteen oh five. The name says exactly what it was: a union of competing rail lines that had previously fractured the city's rail landscape into separate depots. The Washington Southern Railway commissioned the station from the Pennsylvania Railroad's office of the chief engineer in Philadelphia, and the result was a building shaped by the City Beautiful movement, the same civic idealism that was replanning Washington's Mall and Union Square during those years. Several railroads were brought together under one roof, including the Chesapeake and Ohio, the Southern Railway, the Washington Southern, and the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac.

The station's opening was the direct result of a broader planning vision. The McMillan Plan of nineteen oh one and nineteen oh two, the Senate Parks Commission's grand redesign of Washington, had called for the elimination of grade crossings and the consolidation of rail approaches into the capital. Alexandria Union Station was the Virginia anchor of that plan.

For much of the twentieth century, the station served as the gateway to the South for passengers heading down the East Coast corridor. Today it handles both Amtrak long-distance trains and Virginia Railway Express commuter service, threading together a region of more than six million people.

What has not changed is the building itself, its brick walls, arched windows, and broad waiting room still intact, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the better-preserved early-century rail stations on the Atlantic seaboard.