The first real passenger terminals of importance in the country were the Park Square in Boston, and the Grand Central in New York, to which reference has already been made. These presented architectural pretensions such as the railroads of the country had not before offered to the cities they served. They also served as models for bigger things that were to follow. In Boston, the Lowell Road planned and built a large new station, and the era of the passenger terminal was begun.
When the Pennsylvania Railroad built Broad Street Station, at Philadelphia, it built a terminal a little finer than anything accomplished up to that time. Even to-day, with the dignity of years creeping upon it, Broad Street is still one of the foremost American stations. The policy of its owners has been to keep it abreast of the demands of the day, and only recently it has been greatly enlarged again, its protecting, interlocking, and signal system being made second to none in the world. To the traveller, the ivory-white waiting-room, where Philadelphians delight to congregate, is an unending source of admiration; engineers find interest in the intricate system of tunnels and bridges by which a number of trunk-line divisions are brought into the station without crossing at level. Broad Street Station shows a yearly increase in its passenger traffic of about five per cent. It has a daily movement of more than 600 loaded trains in and out, in addition to a heavy switching movement. But because of the steady increase of its traffic the Pennsylvania has already planned to relieve it by building a new main for express trains out at West Philadelphia. When that is done Broad Street will be used exclusively for suburban traffic. A short distance away stands the Market Street Station, of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, a terminal rivalling Broad Street in beauty, and only slightly inferior in capacity. Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.
But the first big station terminals--in our American sense that a thing big must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world--were those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a traffic far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second has a train-shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the cities can, in a measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad station ever built. Each has enough of novelty and interest to make it worthy of attention.