Harrisburg Central Railroad Station and Trainshed

About this property

The Harrisburg Transportation Center (HTC, formerly Pennsylvania Station, Harrisburg or Harrisburg Central Railroad Station) is a railway station and transportation hub in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It is located on the eastern edge of Downtown Harrisburg between the intersections of Aberdeen and Market Streets and 4th and Chestnut Streets. The station is the primary hub for passenger rail and intercity bus services in the Harrisburg metropolitan area and South Central Pennsylvania. The current station is the third on the site. Though technically a union station, which is a station used by several railways, it was never identified as such in publications such as the Official Guide of the Railroads and Steam Navigation Lines or Pennsylvania Railroad Timetables. The first two stations were shared by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), Reading Railroad, Northern Central Railway (NCR), and the Cumberland Valley Railroad (CVR). The third and current station excluded the Reading Railroad, which built its own station in 1856, and the CVR maintained a small depot adjoining the much larger NCR/PRR station. The CVR station was razed sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The Reading Railroad discontinued passenger service into its Harrisburg station in the 1950s and its station was torn down in the early 1960s to make room for a new post office; however, it continued passenger service on the Queen of the Valley. The last northbound train bound for Sunbury, Williamsport and Buffalo was the Penn Central's unnamed successor to the Buffalo Day Express, ending in 1971. The last Erie-bound PRR trains were in 1965 before the Northern Express and Southern Express were diverted to Buffalo. The current station was built by PRR in 1887 and significantly rebuilt with its distinctive barn roof in 1905 following a serious fire in 1904. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and is also designated as a National Historic Landmark. The station is one of the few railway stations in the United States that still has a train shed above the tracks. It also has a red brick exterior, unlike many of the still-used U.S. railway stations built slightly later in the early 1900s that have white stone facing, including 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and Washington Union Station in Washington, D.C. The building, which is owned by Amtrak and managed and operated by the Harrisburg Redevelopment Authority, contains office space above the building's main lobby that is used by various tenants. It also contains a moderately large meeting room called the Pennsylvania Room that can be used for meetings and other large gatherings.

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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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