Union Railroad Station

About this property

Tampa Union Station is an Amtrak train station in Tampa, Florida. The station is located at 601 North Nebraska Avenue (SR 45). Built in 1912, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 as Union Railroad Station The station building was closed in 1984 and reopened in 1998 after restoration. The station is served by the daily Floridian. The station was originally built with eight tracks, although only one is in regular use today (designated as "Track 3"), with adjacent Track 2 also available for use by trains as needed. Amtrak added a new, 1,000-foot (305 m) high-level platform and canopy to Track 3 to improve accessibility, which opened in November 2020. The construction of the new platform resulted in changes to track configurations at the station. Tracks 4, 5, and 6 were removed to facilitate the construction of the high-level platform, although there are plans to restore them in the future if demand warrants. Although some of the other tracks remain in place, they are out of service. Original track bumpers, constructed of poured concrete, are still located at the ends of several of the remaining tracks and at the ends of former tracks. Adjacent to each of these bumpers are concrete planters which have "TUS" cast into them. Union Station consists of the main building which includes the waiting room, as well as an attached restaurant and baggage building. A detached express building located adjacent to the baggage building handled packages and freight transfers from trains to trucks (all structures remain on site with the exception of the express building, which was demolished in the 1970s). At its opening, Union Station's waiting room was segregated (during the Jim Crow era, a wall across the center of the waiting room divided "white" and "colored" passengers, with separate entrances for each). Segregation remained a common practice in railroad stations in the South until it was stricken down by the Interstate Commerce Commission as a result of NAACP v. St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company in 1955. However, like many train stations in the South, Tampa Union Station remained segregated to an extent even after the Interstate Commerce Commission's order. Passengers of intrastate trains were still bound by Jim Crow laws. During January 1956, the Tampa Times photographed signage at Union Station wherein the word "Intrastate" had been added beneath the old signage above the entrance to the so-called "colored" side of the waiting room. Full desegregation would not come until later. In fact, the Florida statute providing for segregation on railroads remained a law on the books as late as 1967, although by then the practice had fallen into disuse.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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