The famous AmShack is no more! St. Louis Today carries today’s landmark development (Yes, this is looking like St. Louis Day on Trains for America.).
The new glass-and-steel center on South 15th Street, near the Scottrade Center, also serves as a depot for Greyhound buses. It has four train platforms and 10 bus bays. Bus passengers began using the building in June.
Construction began on the $27 million building in 2006. Amtrak was expected to move into the station in the fall of 2007, but work fell behind schedule. Most recently, track work and platform construction kept Amtrak from moving into the building.
Now, all that remains is for somebody to found the Amtrak Double-wide Temporary Station Historic Preservation Society.
Filed under: Amtrak, Regional USA Passenger Rail
Trains For America 
My wife and I had a very pleasant trip on Amtrak from Chicago to St. Louis and back a couple months ago. Both trains were sold out. Both trains arrived early! The downside was that we still had to visit the Amshak like our previous trip to St. Louis. Also, since our friend was getting married in the suburbs we needed a rent a car. Where was that at the train station – NOT A SINGLE RENTAL. We took the metrolink to the airport to get the rent a car. How about car sharing at train stations like i-go cars? http://www.igocars.org/
Some day!
Is there a convenient weatherproof connnection between MetroLink and Amtrak/Greyhound?
What a sad,ugly,cheerless piece of work the new Amtrak-Greyhound station in St. Louis is, and what a sad commentary on the state of rail transportation in the U.S.
I saw the new station this Christmas when visiting St Louis for the holidays and almost wept at the lack of vision and lost opportunity here. I remember the excitement of meeting my grandfather at old Union Station on Market St decades ago, and how much glamor and excitement still attached to the magnificent old place even though rail was in steep decline.
Greeting my sore eyes this Christmas,was a bizarre concrete structure jammed under a tangle of highway overpasses in a desolate pocket to the south of downtown, side by side a freight rail yard and half buried down enbankments overgrown with weeds, in a part of town where you wouldn’t dare walk four steps from the station. From where I stood in front of the station, I could see the copper roof of the lovely old Union Station a few blocks to the northe and west.
Well, the station does NOT exactly say “Welcome to St. Louis,” but rather, “Get Lost”, or “Don’t Bother to Stop”. Meanwhile, the beautiful mall in old Union Station is floundering and is leased mostly to tourist-trappy little shops retailing plastic throwaway trash. The exquisite lobby is mostly deserted.
Why couldn’t half the parking lot (formerly the rail concourse) of Union Station have been given over to the passenger trains, so that the trains and the mall could help support each other. It would supply more shoppers and browsers for the mall, and enliven it substantially, and provide a glamorous entrance to St. Louis for travelers that might make them want to hang around for a while. Where was the vision here?
No way will St. Louis ever again be a major rail hub as once it was. Worse, the new station signals a total lack of commitment to rebuilding passenger rail on the scale we will shortly need.
What a loss and a waste. I was glad to continue my journey out to the exquisite little station in Kirkwood.
FYI, as to car rental, the Sheraton hotel across the street from the new station has a Budget car rental agency in the lobby. I have used Budget there many times and have had excellent pricing and service. I highly recommend doing that, as opposed to going the airport. to get a car. I also agree that using historic Union Station was again would have been much better – but this is a major improvement over Amshak.
I agree it’s an improvement over the Amshak, but that’s what’s known as Damning By Faint Praise.
It’s a sad reflection on our country that we tolerate so much built ugliness and have become so inured to the total lack of civic amenity and destruction of our public spaces that we are grateful for something like this.
I’m very worried for the mall at Union Station, especially in these times. I hope the unwinding of commercial credit and attendant shrinkage of retail doesn’t deal a death blow to this mall. There will be many shuttered malls resulting from the credit bust as it is.
Last time I was in it, a couple of years ago, traffic was very light three days in front of Christmas, with the economy still holding up. The problem with the place has always been that it isn’t not well-anchored- there aren’t enough people living downtown and midtown to form a base of support, and West End people live closer to the Galleria. Placing the train station there would have helped out a lot, in addition to being the most appropriate use of the building to begin with. Some good city planning would have more high-density middle and upper-middle income, with the necessary retail, surrounding the place.
is it possible to get to the amtrak station on the metro-link from illinois? if so, what is the stop named