(rshsdepot) Greensboro, NC

["Bernie Wagenblast" <brwagenblast_@_comcast.net>]

The Return Of The Depot ; City Buses Start Using Station Aug. 10; Railroad
Traffic Resumes Late Next Year.

Greensboro News Record
Aug. 3, 2003

In railroading, timing is everything, which is why conductors of old carried
gold pocket watches.
In the late 1920s, Southern Railway built a spectacular station for
Greensboro in the nick of time. Had the railroad waited a few more years,
the station would have been scratched.
Fortunately for the city, Southern couldn't see around the next curve to the
abyss awaiting the nation's economy - or to interstate highways and airports
that would lure people from trains.
The station was finished just before the Great Depression and World World II
halted most new construction for 15 years. After the war, railroad passenger
traffic plummeted. Stations, including Greensboro's, where 40 trains once
arrived and departed daily, became empty tombs.
"... At least it's here," declared someone in the crowd of several thousand
who came to say farewell on July 2, 1979, when Southern closed the station
and donated it to the city.
And it's still here 24 years later - and about to serve travelers again.
The city, state and federal governments are spending $19 million to covert
the station into a transportation center for local, regional and
long-distance buses. and, yes, trains. Greyhound/ Trailways buses will start
departing from the station Tuesday. Greensboro Transit Authority buses will
start there Aug. 10.
The station's formal dedication and public open house will be held Aug. 29
and 30. Ground will be broken Aug. 29 on Phase 2, which will bring trains
back to the station in December 2004. Phase 2 will cost $10 million in state
and federal money.
GTA bus riders should be astonished at the difference between what they now
endure and what they will enjoy at the station.
For years, buses have started and ended their routes in the 200 block of
South Davie Street. Passengers wait in open-air sheds that become summertime
steam ovens and wintertime ice boxes. At the station, they will have a
climate-controlled waiting room, formerly the Southern Railway baggage area.
Vending machines and restrooms will be available. The large oak pews from
the station's main concourse have been retrieved from storage for the bus
passengers. A separate waiting room for Greyhound and Trailways has been
created in the former Railway Express Agency building next to the Transit
Authority waiting room.
When trains return, passengers will buy tickets in the former Jim Crow-era
waiting room. The limestone slab that reads "Colored Entrance" has been
retired to a Greensboro Historical Museum warehouse.
The future use of the former waiting room for white people, called the
concourse because of its cathedral ceiling, arching windows, wall clock and
colorful, hand-painted map of the Southern Railway system, remains
uncertain. The city would like to find a tenant, preferably a restaurant, to
lease the long, wide space. If not, it may revert to its 1980s and 1990s
use: a place for conferences and social functions, called The Depot.
If Amtrak ridership soars, and it may because of highway congestion and
airport delays, the main concourse might again accommodate rail travelers.
Amtrak's expansion, though, could be stunted by a Bush Administration
proposal to transfer Amtrak's costs from the federal government to the
states. Some states may refuse to pay for passenger trains. The N.C.
Department of Transportation already supports rail travel, subsidizing two
Amtrak trains, the Carolinian and the Piedmont.
The name "Southern Railway" remains etched across the top of the station.
The lettering style has been duplicated in the word "Greensboro," which is
engraved on four sides of a new tower built outside.
The tower's dark-red brick and limestone trim match the station's. Besides
adding a decorative touch, the tower houses an elevator to take passengers
to the bus boarding areas.
The station and its auxiliary buildings stretch a block along East
Washington Street. The main building, which faces Church Street at the
intersection of Washington, makes a strong statement with its classical
architecture. From a hill on Church Street a half-mile away, the station's
tall, classical portico with six Ionic columns looms.
"I never thought I would get lost in a passenger station in Greensboro,"
declared conductor W.C. Donnell, who, at 11:55 a.m. April 12, 1927, was
aboard the first train to reach the station, Atlantic & Yadkin Railroad No.
30 from Mount Airy.
The station was a city in itself, with a barber shop, drug store, newsstand,
restaurant, snack bar and telegraph office.
More than 10,000 people toured the station the day before it opened, and
from the start, the concourse hummed with travelers and people hanging out
to watch others embark on trips to far-away places or short jaunts to
locales such as Madison, Ramseur, Reidsville or Winston-Salem. Small
mechanized vehicles pulled heavy metal carts with steel wheels stacked with
luggage from the station to the trains.
On the platforms, porters scurried into action before any sign of an
approaching train. Their secret: When trains reached White Oak in north
Greensboro or Pomona in west Greensboro, they tripped a wire that caused a
small light bulb on the platform to blink.
It became a ritual for parents and grandparents to bring children to the
station. They enjoyed the echoes bouncing off the terrazzo marble floors,
lofty walls and ceilings of the main concourse. They loved to hear the voice
coming from a loudspeaker to sound a last call for passengers boarding, for
example, the Piedmont. As the voice announced the destinations - Reidsville,
Danville, Lynchburg, Charlottesville, Washington - it always stretched out
the syllables of the cities.
Children would make a 360-degree exploration of the station's rotunda, which
was entered from the main concourse through a large arch. Both waiting rooms
opened into the rotunda, as did a side entrance for passengers arriving by
taxi. On one side of the rotunda were doors to the tunnel, ramps and stairs
that led under and up to the tracks.
Eight sets of tracks passed the station, two reserved for freight trains,
the rest for passenger trains. The long-distance trains to New York and New
Orleans always stopped along Tracks 1 and 2, bordered by a 1,200-foot-long
platform.
On rare occasions, trains wound up on the wrong track. Because of a
misplaced switch, a steam locomotive sped onto a short siding reserved for
private rail cars behind the station on July 30, 1941. The engine smashed
through a concrete wall and dropped 20 feet into the station's parking lot
below. Thousands came to gawk.
Throughout the day, express and mail trains would arrive with out- of-town
newspapers for the newsstand in the concourse. Some express trains were
nonstop: A man would stand in the door of the moving train and heave a
bundle of newspapers onto the platform. They wound up in the newsstand
below, where Greensboro residents came daily and late at night to get the
latest editions of out-of-town newspapers.
A group of black teenagers who lived near Julian and Best streets would walk
to the newsstand late on summer nights in the late 1940s. They would ask
proprietor Max Stein how Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the
major leagues, had done that day for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
"Buy a paper and find out," Stein would snap.
The station was built during the red-hot economy of the 1920s, and the year
it opened, 1927, was a banner year of brick and mortar in Greensboro. The
King Cotton Hotel, the Guilford Building, the Central Fire Station and the
ornate Carolina Theatre opened.
An impressive skyline took shape, visible from trains that rolled into the
station. Often, they carried important people.
One day in July 1944, freelance photographer Clarence "Tex" Miller got a tip
that first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was at the station. Miller grabbed his
Speed Graphic camera and found Roosevelt in the Red Cross canteen, seated
among crates of Coca-Colas. She was waiting for a train to take her to
western North Carolina for a speech.
"No one asked for any press credentials or nothing," Miller recalled in a
1997 interview.
Sadly, nine months later, the body of her husband, President Franklin
Roosevelt, passed the station at 12:57 a.m. on a special train from Warm
Springs, Ga., where he had died. Thousands stood along platforms at the
station to pay their last respects. A bugler played taps.
During his 13 years as president, Roosevelt had passed frequently in his
presidential rail car, the Ferdinand Magellan, headed for Georgia and
elsewhere. The train never stopped, but the Daily News and The Record
newspapers dispatched reporters to the station to watch the train go by,
just in case anything happened.
Southern Railway blessed Greensboro with the largest train station in North
Carolina. Charlotte's never topped it. Greensboro had become an important
rail junction. Southern's eastern main line from Washington to Atlanta
passed through the city, as did tracks to Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Mount Airy
and Fayetteville.
The convergence of rails gave Greensboro, starting in 1890, its nickname,
"the Gate City." You couldn't get there by train without going through
Greensboro. Because of the railroad, Greensboro grew from a town to a city
and became a transportation/distribution center.
Southern had another reason for favoring Greensboro with such a monument. It
had become apparent by the second decade of the 20th century that the
existing station, built in 1899 (and still standing next to the South Elm
Street crossing), was too small. The railroad, however, was broke then and
couldn't afford to build a new station. Greensboro officials offered to lend
money, and voters approved a $1.3 million bond referendum for this purpose
in 1922.
Southern's economic health improved, and the loan wasn't needed. But
railroad executives were grateful for the gesture of faith. Therefore,
Southern spent lavishly on a station meant for a city of 100,000 people. At
the time, Greensboro had fewer than 30,000 people.
Architect Christopher Dull, whose firm, Moser Mayer Phoenix Associates of
Greensboro, did the design work for the new transportation center, says the
original architectural drawings don't reflect what was actually built. That
isn't unusual: Features often are deleted during construction to cut costs.
But the reverse was true with the Greensboro station, Dull discovered.
Expensive extras, such as Tennessee marble wainscoting, were added.
When the station was completed, O.D. Colaw, Southern Railway's construction
engineer, declared: "There is nothing shoddy about this job."
The New York architectural firm of Fellheimer and Wagner designed the
station and reshaped the area around it to eliminate several railroad
crossings that had caused one irate motorists to sue the railroad for
inconvenience.
The architects designed a metal underpass and lowered Davie Street to go
through it. The South Elm crossing remained, but if blocked, motorists could
detour a half-block to the Davie underpass, an option still available now.
The firm's principals, Alfred Fellheimer and Steward Wagner, ranked as the
nation's outstanding train-station designers. Fellheimer had worked on New
York's Grand Central Terminal. They had mastered the logistics of moving
people between tracks and stations by using tunnels and ramps. They
eliminated the dangerous practice of passengers walking across tracks to
reach trains, as they did at the old South Elm station.
The day the Greensboro station opened, the railroad brought the past and
present together. Matilda Eckels Allford, 78, who as a little girl in 1856
had watched the first train ever to arrive in the city, returned to see the
first train to reach the new station. The station was built on the site of
her childhood home, Rose Villa, an estate occupied by Yankees at the end of
the Civil War. Southern named a private street, which trucks used between
Washington Street and the Railway Express Agency building, Eckels Street to
honor her father, former Greensboro Mayor Alexander Eckels.
J.E. Tomlinson, who had bought the first ticket at the South Elm Station in
1899, was first to buy a ticket at the new station.
Another person who came for the opening was Sunshine Wyrick, the traffic cop
at Jefferson Square, where Market and Elm intersect. Before joining the
police force, Wyrick had been a railroad conductor. He predicted the new
station would become obsolete as quickly as the old one.
Wyrick should have known better. Transportation habits were changing. At
Jefferson Square, Wyrick tried to unsnarl the growing number of cars, buses
and trucks that converged there.
Newspaper stories also hinted at the shift.
"Plans Under Way for Lighting of Airport" read a headline in the Daily News
heralding the opening of the new Tri-City Airport, now Piedmont Triad
International Airport. Another headline said: "Route 60 will not be
diverted," over a story about how Chamber of Commerce officials feared a
proposed road connecting Julian to Greensboro would be rerouted from Julian
to High Point.
Still another headline said: "A&Y proposal for taking off two trains is
protested at hearing." The A&Y, which Southern would eventually acquire,
said people were riding buses instead of trains between Sanford and Mount
Airy.
By the 1950s, the station's restaurant and barbershop had closed. In 1976,
the only daytime train still serving the station was discontinued, leaving
only the nighttime Crescent.
Three years later, Southern decided the big station was too costly to keep
open for one train. It gave the station to the city and opened a small depot
for the Crescent in the Pomona freight yard in west Greensboro. The railroad
sealed the tunnels and ramps at the downtown station and demolished the
trackside platforms.
In Phase 2 of the transportation center, the platforms will be rebuilt and
the underground passage reopened and extended, with three new openings
leading up to the tracks. Each opening will have side-by-side staircases, a
ramp, escalators and an elevator. A new tunnel will be built for moving
baggage from trains to station.
The Crescent again will call at the station, as will as the Piedmont and
Carolinian trains, which were added in the 1990s.
As a nostalgic touch, two antique metal baggage carts sent from downtown to
the Pomona depot 24 years ago will return for duty at the old station that
now will look like new.
Contact Jim Schlosser at 373-7081 or jschlosser_@_news-record.com.

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The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

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End of RSHSDepot Digest V1 #723
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=================================
The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org