Railroads have a place in the history of structural engineering for buildings. Big terminals, in the 1870s and later, were among the first buildings in the US to be so complex that a structural engineer was a necessary part of the design team.
Not so much in the station pictured above. That’s the Ulster and Delaware Railroad in the Catskills, circa 1902, and that station is a small wood-frame building that is little different structurally from what could have been built a few thousand years ago. The U&D was reasonable successful serving local traffic but was a minnow surround by sharks, with the Erie RR to its west and south, the Delaware and Hudson RR directly competing in its area, and the New York Central to its east and north. In other words, the engineers working on planning and design didn’t have to expect huge future increases in traffic.
On the other hand, an example of some of the most inventive structural engineering required for a railroad building is Grand Central in New York City, which went through three major iterations in less than 40 years. The original building, Grand Central Dept, was completed in 1872, and was a large building
but what made it interesting was its train shed, one of the earliest US examples of a “balloon shed” clear-spanning across the tracks.
That station lasted 13 years. By 1885, an annex had been built, adding more tracks and a secondary train shed, to accommodate the growth of traffic. A few years later, the NY Central gave up and doubled the height of the building (by adding more floors on top), almost doubled the width by combining the annex with the main building, doubled the size of the waiting room (by combining interior spaces) and most importantly replaced the old curved mansards with domes, creating Grand Central Station. The new/old building was completed in 1900. The old train shed was kept, and I believe this is a sign that the Central’s engineers knew that this work was just a stop-gap.
Between 1903 and 1912, the old building was torn down in phases and replaced by an entirely new station – Grand Central Terminal – that was bigger in every way
has enormous long-span interior spaces
and has an enormous, two-level, underground train yard.
So in the space of a few years and a few dozen miles from the U&D station, we reach a building that could only have been constructed and operated using steel, reinforced concrete, and electricity.
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