Stations that aren't in the downtown

Baltimore Penn Station is not in downtown Baltimore. Why is that? Was there ever a station downtown?

What are some of the other big city stations that aren't located downtown and why? I'm thinking of ATL for one.

I have never used the Baltimore station and can't speak for why it is located where it is. I do know there used to be two downtown Atlanta stations, now long gone. I do not know when Peachtree ended up being the only station for Southern Railway, but in Decembe of 1970 I made a trip on the Southern Crescent with my college roommate to Atlanta and that was the only station. ( other than the two bit Georgia Railroad location that was still in operation at the time. ) It is said that Peachtree Station was intended as a suburban station and as many are aware, it does not serve the purpose very well for a long distance train.

Could be totally wrong, but isn't the station for Phoenix no where near downtown?

The station for Phoenix was moved around 1996 to Maricopa, a suburb about 30 miles to the south. That is because Union Pacific downgraded the line and took some of it out of service, so the huge metro area of Phoenix has one trip-weekly train out in an isolated location. The Maricopa station is on the freight mainline that runs south of Phoenix. An ideal situation? Hardly! :unsure:

Albany is across the river in Rensselaer. Definitely not downtown.

Miami is totally not downtown. Detroit's pretty close. Savannah is a little far, too. I figured these out by just looking on Google Earth. Yay Google Earth!

Pre Amtrak it seems like railroads were doing everything they could to discourage or eliminate rail travel. The Santa Fe moved there Fort Madison Iowa station from downtown to "shopton" a mile down the road in the late 1960s. Granted they stopped there anyway for a crew change but the current station is pretty bleak compared to the one downtown.

northnorthwest said:

Baltimore Penn Station is not in downtown Baltimore. Why is that? Was there ever a station downtown?

What are some of the other big city stations that aren't located downtown and why? I'm thinking of ATL for one.

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I think of Charleston, Newport News, and Jacksonville.

Not Big Cities, but mid-size.

Newport News - now, there's a Norfolk downtown station. Good, sweet. The old and still working NPN station is/was halfway to nowhere on The Peninsula. The whole mouth of the Chesapeake is a land transport nightmare - for ships, real good.

Charleston, SC - the current station is a few miles from the historic city center. Getting to the city center by public transit - sketchy, but not dangerous neighborhood. Public transport - little. Don't know the history

Jacksonville has no city center.

<< edit >> but the Jacksonville local bus transit is --adequate-- Amtrak to airport to Navy base -- slow, infrequent, but serviceable. Did Jacksonville ever have a "city center station" dunno >>

Isn't the Seattle King Street station more or less in an industrial part of town? I've driven around there and it's almost all rail yards and port shipping to the south. However, it's kind of on the outskirts of what used to be downtown, although I think that definition has changed.

Oakland's Jack London Square station is almost a mile away from downtown. The previous 16th Street station was even further away from downtown.

Reno's downtown is across the Truckee River from the station. However, it's right next to several of the biggest buildings in Reno.

BCL said:

Isn't the Seattle King Street station more or less in an industrial part of town? I've driven around there and it's almost all rail yards and port shipping to the south. However, it's kind of on the outskirts of what used to be downtown, although I think that definition has changed.

Oakland's Jack London Square station is almost a mile away from downtown. The previous 16th Street station was even further away from downtown.

Reno's downtown is across the Truckee River from the station. However, it's right next to several of the biggest buildings in Reno.

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Seattle King Street station maybe was on the low end of Central city. Not any more. Gentrification, de-industrialisation. New stadiums. Good transit options.

Now just another part of megacity central. Like it. Want old industrial? - moving farther and farther south.

greatcats said:

I have never used the Baltimore station and can't speak for why it is located where it is. I do know there used to be two downtown Atlanta stations, now long gone. I do not know when Peachtree ended up being the only station for Southern Railway, but in Decembe of 1970 I made a trip on the Southern Crescent with my college roommate to Atlanta and that was the only station. ( other than the two bit Georgia Railroad location that was still in operation at the time. ) It is said that Peachtree Station was intended as a suburban station and as many are aware, it does not serve the purpose very well for a long distance train.

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In December, 1970, the L&N Georgian was still arriving and leaving from Union Station. The Nancy Hanks II left from one of the Platforms from Terminal Station. You had to take an elevator to the basement of the Southern Railway office Building. The Georgia Railway train left from the former frieghthouse accross from the Capitol Building. I traveled from Louisville to Nashville to Atlanta to Savannah in February, 1971 and thats the way it was then. I was in Atlanta in January, 1970 and the Southern trains and the Nancy Hanks were still using Terminal Station so some time in 1970 was when the change to Peachtree station was made for the Crescent and Piedmont LTD.

Prior to 1971, Southern moved to a new site in Charlotte. After 1971, Southern moved to a new site in Greensboro but this was later reversed by NCDOT. When Amtrak and Auto-Train began joint operation between Louisville and Florida in 1976, Amtrak moved to the Auto-Train site near the Louisville airport.

greatcats said:

The station for Phoenix was moved around 1996 to Maricopa, a suburb about 30 miles to the south. That is because Union Pacific downgraded the line and took some of it out of service, so the huge metro area of Phoenix has one trip-weekly train out in an isolated location. The Maricopa station is on the freight mainline that runs south of Phoenix. An ideal situation? Hardly! :unsure:

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But since it stops in downtown Maricopa, and they don't claim to have a station in Phoenix, it doesn't count.

Savannah (though only about 2 miles away), Charlotte, Jacksonville, etc...

San Jose is outside of downtown. Bakersfield, Stockton and SLO too. Although it depends on your definition of downtown. Those are a 20-30 minute walk away.

San Jose at least has a nice LRT to get you to downtown.

Strictly speaking New York Penn Station isn't quite downtown either. Nor is Philadelphia 30th St. Station or Boston South Station for that matter.

Nor are Union Stations in Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis, Kansas City or Denver.

NW cannonball said:

Newport News - now, there's a Norfolk downtown station. Good, sweet. The old and still working NPN station is/was halfway to nowhere on The Peninsula. The whole mouth of the Chesapeake is a land transport nightmare - for ships, real good.

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What? Huh? The location on Warwick where US17 (Mercury Blvd.) crosses is ideal. It is about as close as I'd ever want to get to the "downtown" area of Newport News! Jeesh, take it from someone who used to work at the shipyard there. Unless some gentrification has occurred since I was last there, that place can be as scary as any unsavory location you can think of! Downtown NN at "25 & J" was always considered to be a gathering place for garden tools (think "hoes" and "rakes"). We had to park just a little down from there and walk to the main gate of NNSY&DD Co.

With NPN being located right at the major crossroads for Hampton and Newport News, the public transportation options there are plentiful. Also, anyone coming to pick you up from the Smithfield (Isle of Wight) side would have a very easy on and off (from the James River Bridge) to pick you up. Of course now that they have a line running directly to Norfolk, that may be an even better option for someone living out that way, including Suffolk and the nether regions of Portsmouth.

The Baltimore station is very much downtown.

As is the Newport News station.

The Newport News station might not be "downtown", but that's because in a sense Newport News doesn't have a downtown. What passes for "downtown" is largely moribund, surrounded by a coal yard, a freight yard and expressway, a shipyard, and a multi-block parking crater. It has seen some revival in recent years, but it is just badly located. Most of the activity is in a middle-density strip that extends north along Jefferson Ave. from about Route 17/J. Clyde Morris Blvd. up past Denbigh Blvd.

For when NPN was put in place (to replace the old C&O station that was downtown), the location is about as good as you can get. It isn't ideal, but it is well-positioned to scoop traffic up from Newport News and Hampton. The new station going in about 3-4 years from now (it's fully funded by the state) will be more in the "new downtown" area.

Baltimore's station isn't smack in the middle of downtown, but it isn't too far out from it either. Baltimore is just one of those cases where ramming the railroad through the absolute center of the city didn't make sense (remember, Baltimore predates the railroads). Norfolk used to be the same way (the old N&W and VGN tracks work their way around the older portions of the city); the current station isn't removed from downtown by much, but the tracks still avoid that core.

Note that the situations in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and Norfolk are not unlike those found in many European cities (where you either have stub-end terminals vaguely in downtown or stations located somewhat outside of the "downtown" area). New York is sort of the same way, insofar as the tracks don't go into the oldest parts of the city (if for no other reason than the railroads were able to do well enough by liquidating stations and ROW in lower Manhattan and moving operations to new, bigger stations further uptown)...the only reason your major stations wound up in Midtown was that in the mid-19th century, "Midtown" didn't exist. I don't think you ever had a non-streetcar/elevated/subway line anywhere south of the street grid in Manhattan.

By contrast, cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh grew up once railroads were already a "thing". Even then you have a royal mess in Chicago because of all the terminating lines at separate stations.

TiBike said:

. . . it depends on your definition of downtown.

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Most excellent point! And after reading DryCreek's post about Newport News (NN) VA - and never having been there - I though I'd give it a look on Google Earth. Entering the name of the town and clicking "Search" zoomed in on a little pushpin-looking icon positioned in the middle of a pond encircled by Town Center Drive. Hmm-m-m. Zooming out in Google Earth revealed the border of NN outlined in green and (without getting too cartographic about it) it looks like the NN pushpin is just about at the geographic center of the town. Big deal, so...

Where is Downtown NN - if there is such a thing officially? Scrolled around in Google Earth and what should appear but "Downtown" by a little red dot on Washington Ave between 39th and 40th Streets. Maybe that's the official downtown as determined or decreed by somebody. Anyway, Google Earth's Ruler mode shows the Amtrak station is 2.6 miles from the Google Earth Downtown spot.

Considering that NN is about 20 miles at its longest from its NW to SE border, is 2.6 miles close enough for it to be declared "downtown"? I'll leave the factual stuff at that.

There are a whole bunch of stations in out of the way places. However, it sounds like the OP was referring to known large cities with downtowns, where a train station is typically in a downtown area to be close to the "action".

There are a lot of decentralized suburban cities with Amtrak stations. That describes most of the stations on the Capitol Corridor route. Sure, Fremont, CA has a population over 200,000, but there is no particular downtown. There is a main drag, but it's not a large city like San Francisco.

And yeah - San Jose's station is surrounded by an arena, open space, and a residential neighborhood. However, they call the arena a "downtown arena" since it's a long block away from the first tall building that might be considered "downtown".

Anderson said:

The new station going in about 3-4 years from now (it's fully funded by the state) will be more in the "new downtown" area.

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Please elaborate!

My wife's parents still live there (mid-Hampton), and they may need to avail themselves of this mode of transportation. Due to medical conditions (urostomy) - flying is out, and also due to their advanced age, driving seems like a bad idea. Anyway, they are determined to come out again this year to visit us. I had them map out a ride via Amtrak, and the NPN station would be their kickoff point. They were quoted a little over $2K for a round trip (with bedroom/first class) with NEC to WAS, then CL to CHI and TE to CBR. I thought that was pretty good, but her stepfather decided that it would be better for them to drive - that way they could "see more of the country*". So, I see them getting out here and realizing that the return trip would be more than they can handle, so I would have to drive them back. Rather than flying PHF to DFW (and not having a way to get the 98 miles home) or to ACT (still 48 miles from home), I think that we could take that trip NPN to CBR and have our son give us a lift home from there. I mentioned this to my wife and she says that I probably shouldn't embark on such an adventure alone and has decided that she would accompany me if my premonition comes to pass.

* code word for "save some money"

niemi24s said:

TiBike said:

. . . it depends on your definition of downtown.

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Most excellent point! And after reading DryCreek's post about Newport News (NN) VA - and never having been there - I though I'd give it a look on Google Earth. Entering the name of the town and clicking "Search" zoomed in on a little pushpin-looking icon positioned in the middle of a pond encircled by Town Center Drive. Hmm-m-m. Zooming out in Google Earth revealed the border of NN outlined in green and (without getting too cartographic about it) it looks like the NN pushpin is just about at the geographic center of the town. Big deal, so...

Where is Downtown NN - if there is such a thing officially? Scrolled around in Google Earth and what should appear but "Downtown" by a little red dot on Washington Ave between 39th and 40th Streets. Maybe that's the official downtown as determined or decreed by somebody. Anyway, Google Earth's Ruler mode shows the Amtrak station is 2.6 miles from the Google Earth Downtown spot.

Considering that NN is about 20 miles at its longest from its NW to SE border, is 2.6 miles close enough for it to be declared "downtown"? I'll leave the factual stuff at that.

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I think there's also a point to be had that putting stations "downtown" doesn't always make as much sense as we think. In a lot of cases, bear in mind, it was/is easier to run the tracks beside/around a city than straight through it. IIRC, this is the situation with Charleston and Savannah (you'd have to run down a spur into the city to get the station downtown-ish, and doing that for any non-terminating trains just doesn't make sense due to lost time getting into/out of town). This is also how Deland got such a strange station location: It was close to the city, but it didn't make sense for the railroad building the main line to divert it over to Deland proper.

Anderson said:

I think there's also a point to be had that putting stations "downtown" doesn't always make as much sense as we think. In a lot of cases, bear in mind, it was/is easier to run the tracks beside/around a city than straight through it. IIRC, this is the situation with Charleston and Savannah (you'd have to run down a spur into the city to get the station downtown-ish, and doing that for any non-terminating trains just doesn't make sense due to lost time getting into/out of town). This is also how Deland got such a strange station location: It was close to the city, but it didn't make sense for the railroad building the main line to divert it over to Deland proper.

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I think it might depend on a number of factors. For years I remember seeing abandoned rail that used to criss-cross around large cities like San Francisco - right on the pavement. Mostly they seemed to be in warehouse areas where freight could be loaded directly into boxcars. However, there were also ones that shared the road with all other traffic. Oakland, California still has that section of Embarcadero Road where there are active train tracks right down the road where cars can drive alongside trains, and the Jack London Square Amtrak station. Not quite a downtown location though.

Large cities in Asia use elevated rail, and it doesn't feel much different than an elevated freeway going through a major city like Chicago. I've been to a few of them, and quite a few of them are definitely in "downtown" locations. I believe one goal of California's HSR project is to set up a station in the new Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, which is squarely in the downtown area.

BCL said:

Anderson said:

I think there's also a point to be had that putting stations "downtown" doesn't always make as much sense as we think. In a lot of cases, bear in mind, it was/is easier to run the tracks beside/around a city than straight through it. IIRC, this is the situation with Charleston and Savannah (you'd have to run down a spur into the city to get the station downtown-ish, and doing that for any non-terminating trains just doesn't make sense due to lost time getting into/out of town). This is also how Deland got such a strange station location: It was close to the city, but it didn't make sense for the railroad building the main line to divert it over to Deland proper.

Click to expand...

I think it might depend on a number of factors. For years I remember seeing abandoned rail that used to criss-cross around large cities like San Francisco - right on the pavement. Mostly they seemed to be in warehouse areas where freight could be loaded directly into boxcars. However, there were also ones that shared the road with all other traffic. Oakland, California still has that section of Embarcadero Road where there are active train tracks right down the road where cars can drive alongside trains, and the Jack London Square Amtrak station. Not quite a downtown location though.

Large cities in Asia use elevated rail, and it doesn't feel much different than an elevated freeway going through a major city like Chicago. I've been to a few of them, and quite a few of them are definitely in "downtown" locations. I believe one goal of California's HSR project is to set up a station in the new Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, which is squarely in the downtown area.

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Alameda still had Pacific Electric tracks visible about five years ago. The issue is, as you've noted, a lot of those are industrial lines that were often packed in wherever they would fit. The others that come to mind (such as the now-tourist line in Savannah or the lines in Portland, Maine) tend to be jammed in along the waterfront (where they would serve warehouses and docks).

One other thing to consider is that for a good chunk of the early 20th century there wasn't much alternative to steam locomotives, and those were often unpopular in cities for all of the noise and smoke (witness Brooklyn's history with the LIRR, better known as why the LIRR's line to Manhattan runs through Queens). So if you were going for street running or something similar, dropping a line down Main Street (where one didn't already exist) for a steam line was often going to hit roadblocks...not to mention that a more-than-moderate frequency line in the middle of a city running on the street could easily run into all sorts of problems (Eleventh Avenue was apparently called Death Avenue back when the New York Central did street running on it because of the number of train-versus-pedestrian incidents).

Even so, partly because of costs and the like you often find only one or two passenger rail lines in the "downtown core" of a city, with streetcar/ex-streetcar lines being plentiful but often not appropriate for use with other passenger service.

Edit: San Francisco is an interesting case, and it is a bit surprising in some sense that Amtrak hasn't run services in there. In that case, you simply have a bay problem (if a train is not terminating in San Francisco, it is not going to San Francisco).

Edit 2: The "decentralized city" issue pops up a lot. Another issue is that, like in the case of Newport News, sometimes the "downtown" relocates over time.