Surprise! Albany's impressive train station

It may not be located downtown, but Albany, N.Y. has one impressive train station.

Climbing up from the platforms, arriving passengers enter a grand hall that feels unexpectedly monumental. It's way better, for example, than what Amtrak is stuck with at Penn Station in New York City.

All this for Albany?

Well, yes. Albany claims to be the ninth-busiest station in the whole Amtrak system (a statistic I found on ever-reliable Wikipedia), something that seems rather surprising at first glance.

But then again, it makes sense when you consider that Albany boasts a level of passenger rail service that most small cities in the United States haven't seen since World War II.

Not only does the Capital Region enjoy frequent service to Penn Station (14 round-trips each weekday, according to the current Amtrak timetable), but it also maintains frequent service to Buffalo (three trains daily each way), as well as nightly service west to Cleveland and Chicago (sleeper on the Lake Shore Limited, anyone?), east to Boston, and north to the thriving metropolis of Rutland, Vt.

Add in two exotic international trains that cross the Canadian border – the Maple Leaf to/from Toronto and the Adirondack to/from Montreal, which both pass through here each day – and you've got yourself a schedule that most cities of similar size would envy.

So it adds up to one busy place – about 700,000 rail passengers a year, again according to Wikipedia. And things will only get busier due to a recent agreement with freight carrier CSX for Amtrak to take control of the tracks from here south to Poughkeepsie, a big chunk of the route to New York City.

This will improve dispatching and also clear the way for track improvements to speed up travel time to/from the Big Apple, so more service is planned for the future – so much so that a fourth platform is planned in additional to the existing three.

Just as the level of passenger service evokes a bygone era (a nightly sleeper to Chicago?), so does the passenger terminal. It's big – not quite cathedral scale, but big enough to give the Capital Region a rail gateway that the community can be proud of.

The main hall, ringed by balconies and sporting an impressively tall windows, has a genuinely grand feeling. The peaked roof soaring above evokes a feeling of being in some great Gothic hunting lodge or library. The tall windows looked impressive and inspiring even in the darkness.

The colors work together like players in a string quartet: elegant pink granite, rich brown wood, green-painted steel structural and ornamental elements, cream-colored walls, all of it anchored and reflected and amplified by very attractive designs in the floor tiling.

And it's a busy enough place to support a nice range of retailers, including a full sit-down restaurant, a big bookstore/newsstand, and other shops. It was enough to be useful, anyway, to those of us on the Lake Shore Limited (Boston to Chicago, with a two-hour layover in Albany) who wanted to escape the train for awhile and wander around.

All this in a station that, praise be, was actually designed and built in the modern era, opening in 2002.

I'd been through it before, but never had a chance to explore the station since it opened. (In earlier days, my primary memories of Albany are of the downtown bus station, which I used to visit a girlfriend. Later, while in college in the 1980s, I would take Amtrak from NYC up to visit a high school friend at Rennsalaer Polytechnic Institute, but I recall the station being little more than a platform in the middle of nowhere.

Of course prior to all this, Albany was home to Albany Union Station, an enormous Beaux Arts station from the late 19th century right in center of downtown. Here it is:

With rail service in decline, then-tenant Penn Central moved out in December 1968, and the majestic building fell into serious disrepair. Fortunately, a bank renovated it in the 1980s, and it's back in business today, though not as a rail station.

Which takes us back to the present station, about a mile-and-a-half away and across the Hudson from downtown Albany. Although it was dark, I ventured out front to see if the station's exterior lived up to the inside. I wasn't disappointed. The place has the same feel – a structure of consequence that gives the feeling that something important happens here.

And perched high above the main entrance was, yes, a giant clock (non-digital) with four sides that must have been visible from some distance. The faces were lit, too and each seemed to be displaying the correct time, too.

Yes, I suppose overall the place does have a kind of modern synthesized Disney World feel to it. The clock tower in particular looks like something out of sci-fi movie – or maybe a giant pencil eraser. In terms of a local reference point, it might be a kind of stripped-down version of the Governor's Mansion:

Is this...

...an homage to this?

Perhaps this feeling is a function of the place just being so – well, new. After all, we don't see many brand spanking new train stations in this country anymore.

In fact, the only other one I can think of is the big new Lautenberg transfer station in Secaucus, N.J, which rises out of the marshes and does its best to channel the ghost of the original Penn Station, the next stop on the line. The Lautenberg station, too, feels kind of theme-park-ish, perhaps just by virtue of its newness. But hey – it took Grand Central Station a century to become the Grand Central Station we know today.

One element that adds to the station's role as a transport hub is a surprisingly robust bus service. I remember my RPI friend joking about the local bus system's inane radio commercials, but there seems to be a heckuva lot more options than in my hometown of Manchester, N.H. Check out the rack of timetables!

Maybe it helps to be the capital city of the “Empire” state, with all the prestige (and money) that comes with it. Maybe it's no coincidence that the Albany area also boasts a first-rate airport with a wonderful contemporary terminal, as well. (I passed through there in March, 2012.)

Minor quibbles: the bridge above the platforms forms a kind of airline gate waiting area, complete with TV set droning on. Lose it!

But no matter. Albany's train station is a delightful surprise, especially in the context of the revenue-starved state of passenger rail service in the United States. In some places, the detail is extraordinary, such as this frosted and gridded ceiling on the stairways down to the platform.

I would love to see it during the day, with sunlight flooding not only the stairwells, but streaming through the giant windows and down from the glass cupola set way up in the ceiling, like some kind of oversized lighthouse.

So take a lesson from Albany, other cities. A passenger rail station erected in our lifetime does NOT have to have the inspiration and ambiance of a Quonset hut. No indeed – it can be an inviting beacon of light and space, which is certainly was when I passed through.