The question of why Columbus doesn’t have rail currently is a complicated one. Rail in some form existed in Columbus from the 1850s through the mid-1970s. For generations, rail travel was the way to go. It was the connector of distances, the driver of local and state economies. On the local scale, it brought folks to and from their city’s downtown areas for shopping and employment, and the trolley, interurban and other rail systems were as prolific as the horse and buggy before them. So what happened?

Most people today are aware of the Union Station that existed on High Street where the Convention Center is now, but there were actually 2 more depots that proceeded it.
Columbus got it’s first real taste of rail travel in 1851, when the Columbus Union Depot opened, a year after the city’s first railroad, the Columbus & Xenia, entered the city. It was followed by the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad in 1851. Both railroads wanted their depots to be as close to the downtown area as possible, as this was the center of the city’s population and commercial activity. At the time, the city was significantly smaller than it is now. Today, Chestnut and Naughten Streets are within the heart of Downtown, but in the early 1850s, there was almost no development north of these streets, so the two railroads collaborated and purchased a plot of land at the northeastern corner of the North High Street and Naughten intersection, about where the Hyatt Regency is today. This would be the location of their new terminal, the Columbus Union Depot.

This was the first depot in the city and resembled a barn, in some ways similar to the first North Market building that would go up nearby. It was built to handle 3 railroads but by the early 1870s was handling the traffic of 5, well exceeding capacity. Beyond the inadequate size, the depot’s trains dangerously and regularly blocked traffic on High Street, much to the anger of many residents. The push for a new depot began.

Plans were approved in 1871 for the new depot and it was completed and opened in February 1875, with the old depot torn down and many of the old tracks relocated/rerouted to the much larger depot, now located further east of the old depot location, just north of Naughten. Not only was it much larger, but much grander in design. No longer a giant, single story barn, it was instead a 3-story red brick structure and had many architectural features that the previous depot lacked. Tracks still crossed High, but a 160-ft tunnel underneath helped to relieve congestion. For years, this new setup solved many of the previous problems, but a steady increase in train traffic (there were over 120 daily trains by the early 1890s), as well as pedestrian and horse and buggy traffic getting too and from the depot began to cause major problems in the area once more. A new depot was once again needed.
The second Union Station.

The High Street tunnel that connected the 2nd depot, around 1888.

The third and most recognizable depot was completed in 1897: Union Station. It was, by far, the largest and most elaborately designed depot of the three, with 45-ft ceilings, a grand concourse and ornate plaster details. Much of the glamour was lost in a 1920′s remodeling, however, and falling numbers of daily trains gradually eroded maintenance levels. Union Station continued to serve passengers for nearly 50 more years, until the last passenger train passed through Union Station on April 28, 1977, ending over 125 years of passenger rail in the city. Demolition of Union Station had begun almost 7 months earlier, in an underhanded tactic to make way for a proposed convention center. The depot, particularly the arcade section along High Street, had been put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, and preservationists had won an injunction to stop demolition. However, a coalition led by Battelle rushed to demolish the building anyway, and by the time preservationists could act, most of it had already been lost. A single archway was all that remained, and today it sits on the northern corner of McPherson Commons park in the Arena District, a lonely testament to what was lost. The rest of the station was demolished by the fall of 1979. Ironically, the best evidence of how preservation attitudes have changed is just a bit further north with the I-670 retail cap. It is designed to resemble the Union Station arcade.
The final Union Station around 1910. It existed from 1897-1977.

Beyond heavy passenger rail, Columbus also had a streetcar system. The Columbus Street Railroad Company was formed in 1854, but the first streetcar did not come about until June 1863, when a horse-powered car arrived on High Street. By the 1890s, more than a dozen street rail companies were in the city and had almost 35 miles of tracks. Most of these were also horse-drawn until the early 1890s, when electrified lines proved far more efficient, making horse-drawn lines obsolete.

Electric lines and passenger totals continued to grow over the next few decades and, by the mid 1910s, annual passenger tickets exceeded 65 million, equating to almost one trip per day for every man, woman and child living in Columbus at the time. By the 1920s, streetcar lines had spread to almost all of the urban core neighborhoods and inner ring suburbs, but passenger totals were already falling as the automobile increased in popularity. In the 1930s, an attempt was made to adapt to this changing transit environment and the fixed-track streetcars began to be replaced with trolley buses, with the last streetcar decommissioned in 1948. They too, however, only lasted until 1965, when they were replaced with the standard diesel bus.

In Part 2, I’ll examine what happened and why rail has, to this date, not returned to the city.

And for more information on the history of other Columbus transportation forms, visit the following links.
Road and Highway History
Air and Bus Transportation History
Canal and Other Transportation History