Richmond Main Street Station


Richmond Main Street Station, officially the Main Street Station and Trainshed, is a historic railroad station and office building in Richmond, Virginia. It was built in 1901, and is served by Amtrak. It is also an intermodal station with Richmond's city transit bus services, which are performed by Greater Richmond Transit Company. It is colloquially known by locals as The Clock Tower. It is a U.S. National Historic Landmark. Presently Main Street Station serves as a secondary train station for Richmond providing limited Amtrak service directly to downtown Richmond. Several Amtrak trains serving the Richmond metropolitan area presently only stop at the area's primary rail station, Staples Mill Road which is located five miles to the north in Henrico County.
Since 2018, the station has also been a stop along the GRTC Pulse bus rapid transit line.

History

Richmond's Main Street Station in the downtown area was built in 1901 by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Seaboard had newly introduced service to Richmond, and C&O had consolidated the former Virginia Central Railroad and the Richmond and Allegheny Railroad, which had previously maintained separate stations.
The ornate Main Street Station was designed by the Philadelphia firm of Wilson, Harris, and Richards in the Second Renaissance Revival style. In the 1950s, Seaboard shifted its Richmond passenger service to Broad Street Station, but C&O maintained offices in the upper floors, and its passenger service continued at Main Street Station until Amtrak took over in 1971. In 1970, Main Street Station and its trainshed, one of the last surviving trainsheds of its type in the nation, were added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1976 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
In 1972, Hurricane Agnes caused the James River to flood the station. The damage was so severe that in 1975, Amtrak moved its Richmond stops to Richmond Staples Mill Road, a much smaller suburban station in Henrico County, five miles north of downtown. To make matters worse, the station was damaged by fires in 1976 and 1983.
Rail service did not return to Main Street Station until 2003, when it was renovated and returned to service on December 18.

Station layout

The station is served by two daily Northeast Regional trains terminating at Newport News, with a third southbound service to Newport News on Fridays. Northbound trains provide direct service to Union Station in Washington, Pennsylvania Station in New York, and South Station in Boston, among other stops.

Future services

Local officials hope to increase the number of trains by extending some services which currently terminate at the suburban Henrico County station, Richmond Staples Mill Road station. The completion of a bypass around Acca Yard in March 2019 allowed a second Northeast Regional round trip to Norfolk to begin, though it did not immediately increase service to Main Street Station. The 2017 Draft Environmental Impact Report of the DC2RVA project recommended routing all Staples Mill-serving trains through Main Street Station, while maintaining full service to Staples Mill. Other considered alternatives had involved closing one of the two stations, or replacing both with a single station at Boulevard or Broad Street.
Main Street Station is located on the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor, a passenger rail transportation project planned to connect with the existing high speed rail corridor from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., known as the Northeast Corridor and extend similar high speed passenger rail services south through Richmond and Petersburg in Virginia through Raleigh and Charlotte in North Carolina. Since first established in 1992, the U.S. Department of Transportation has since extended the corridor to Atlanta and Macon, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and Birmingham, Alabama.
In 2018, the station became a stop on the GRTC Bus Rapid Transit's Broad and Main Street Line. There are also plans for Main Street Station to become an intermodal station with Richmond's city bus services operated by GRTC, a public service company owned jointly by the City of Richmond and Chesterfield County.