The Chattanooga Choo-Choo (formerly known as Terminal Station) in

Chattanooga, Tennessee Chattanooga ( ) is a city in Hamilton County, Tennessee, United States, and its county seat. It is located along the Tennessee River and borders Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the south. With a population of 181,099 in 2020, it is Tennessee ...

, is a former railroad station once owned and operated by the Southern Railway. Listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

, the station operated as a hotel from 1973 to 2023, and was a member of Historic Hotels of America, part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The two-floor hotel building, once called The MacArthur building, was renovated and renamed in 2023 to The Hotel Chalet by Trestle Studio, a Chicago-based development group.

History

The first Chattanooga Union Station was built in 1858 and demolished in the early 1900s. An initial plan for a smaller facility to handle supplies and small packages was rejected in favor of a grand station to handle passengers as well. Construction on this Terminal Station began in 1906; it was opened in 1909 at the total cost of $1.5 million. The Terminal Station was the first train station in the South to help open a pathway to connect the north from the south, connecting the city of

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ; colloquially nicknamed Cincy) is a city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the northern side of the confluence of the Licking River (Kentucky), Licking and Ohio Ri ...

to Chattanooga. Eventually, the Terminal Station was serving some fifty passenger trains per day plus some freight and package service. It has greeted United States presidents

Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democrat to serve as president during the Prog ...

Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), also known as FDR, was the 32nd president of the United States, serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving U.S. president, and the only one to have served ...

, and

Theodore Roosevelt Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), also known as Teddy or T.R., was the 26th president of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. Roosevelt previously was involved in New York (state), New York politics, incl ...

Decline

Chattanooga was no exception to the general decline in American railroad passenger traffic after World War II. In 1949, the Southern canceled its ''Florida Sunbeam,'' an express train that connected Chattanooga to Detroit, Cincinnati, and Jacksonville, Florida. Traffic continued to decline amid competition from automobiles and airplanes in the 1950s and 1960s. One by one, the Southern cancelled its trains, which included the ''

Pelican Pelicans (genus ''Pelecanus'') are a genus of large water birds that make up the family Pelecanidae. They are characterized by a long beak and a large throat pouch used for catching prey and draining water from the scooped-up contents before ...

,'' connecting New York and New Orleans; '' Ponce de Leon,'' Cincinnati-Jacksonville; '' Royal Palm,'' Cincinnati-Miami; and '' Tennessean,'' Memphis-Washington, D.C. As passenger traffic declined, the railroad began using the station's platforms for storage. In 1970, Southern cancelled its last passenger train to Chattanooga—the '' Birmingham Special'', from

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands, within the wider West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, in England. It is the Lis ...

—and closed Terminal Station. Plans were laid for its demolition.

Restoration

Instead, a group of business people seeking to trade on the " Chattanooga Choo Choo" song and its enduring popularity decided to reopen the station as a hotel. They poured more than $4 million into a renovation and reopened it in April 1973 as the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hilton and Entertainment Complex. In 1989, another group of business people invested another $4 million to refurbish and renovate the hotel and to bring in and hire new management and staff. They renamed it The Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel. The complex was a convention center, hotel and resort with restaurants, shops and a model railroad setup that was operated by the Chattanooga Area Model Railroad Club (now disbanded) on the second floor of the property. Hotel guests could stay in restored passenger railway cars. In 2017, the two rear buildings of the hotel were renovated, turned into small apartments, and renamed Passenger Flats. The train tracks have mostly been removed to accommodate the growth of the city. The modern Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel is adorned with a bright neon miniature sign version of the trains that once visited. The hotel is surrounded and fenced in by rose gardens and includes an additional area for educational historic trolley rides as well as an outdoor ice skating rink during the cold winter months. There are several restaurants, a comedy club and the Gate 11 micro-distillery at Terminal Station, including a restaurant co-owned by actor Norman Reedus. A symbol of the terminals previous life is ex Smoky Mountain Railroad exx Genessee and Wyoming 2-6-0 #206. It has been backdated and renumbered to Cincinnati Southern #29. It was moved to the site in 1972 from the Rebel Railroad in Tennessee and has been on display ever since. It also once featured the "Dinner in the Diner" dining car restaurant, which is no longer operating. Some parts of the complex were connected by a heritage streetcar line, operated by a 1924-built ex-New Orleans Perley Thomas trolley car originally numbered #959; this has been discontinued. In 2022, the complex's owners launched a second renovation, which started with the demolition of one of the passenger cars and the removal of others. Officials said that eight of the train cars will be moved next to the hotel, nine will be moved among the Gardens, and six will be donated to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum. The renovation was slated for completion in mid-2023, when the hotel is to reopen with "127 rooms, including 25 Pullman train car rooms".

Architecture and pop culture

The Beaux-Arts-style station designed by

Donn Barber Donn Barber FAIA (October 19, 1871 – May 29, 1925) was an American architect. Biography Donn Barber was born on October 19, 1871, in Washington, D.C., the son of Charles Gibbs Barber and his wife, Georgiana Williams. Barber was a grandson o ...

remains one of the grandest buildings in Chattanooga, with an arched main entrance leading to a center section with an ceiling dome with a skylight. The station included a main waiting room, bathrooms, ticket offices, and other services for passengers. The original Terminal Station was merely one story in height, so the aforementioned dome and skylight made this area look gargantuan in juxtaposition to other similar buildings, while the arched main entrance was said to be the "largest arch in the world." Lighting was provided by large brass

chandelier A chandelier () is an ornamental lighting device, typically with spreading branched supports for multiple lights, designed to be hung from the ceiling. Chandeliers are often ornate, and they were originally designed to hold candles, but now inca ...

s. Terminal Station had 14 train tracks serving seven passenger platforms. The then-president of the Southern Railway System, William Finley, wanted the architecture to recall the National Park Bank of New York. The 1941 Glenn Miller song " Chattanooga Choo Choo" told the story of a train trip from Track 29 at Pennsylvania Station in

through

Baltimore Baltimore is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland. With a population of 585,708 at the 2020 census and estimated at 568,271 in 2024, it is the 30th-most populous U.S. city. The Baltimore metropolitan area is the 20th-large ...

North North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating Direction (geometry), direction or geography. Etymology T ...

and

South Carolina South Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders North Carolina to the north and northeast, the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, and Georgia (U.S. state), Georg ...

, and finishing the trip at Terminal Station. (No such train actually operated.)

References

External links