OTTUMWA, Iowa — The City of Ottumwa has agreed to purchase the city’s Amtrak depot, currently owned by the Iowa Heartland Historical Connection.
The Ottumwa Courier reports that, by a 4-1 vote on Tuesday, the Ottumwa City Council agreed to purchase the building at a cost of $480,000, funds included in bond approvals earlier this summer. An adjacent clubhouse will also be included.
City Administrator Philip Rath and council member Marc Roe both indicated that the building could be crucial to downtown redevelopment, with Roe saying the city had previously “lost a grant that would completely completely re-imagine what downtown at the time will look like because we didn’t have control of that building.”
Rath also said Amtrak is interested in extending its waiting-room lease and improving the station platform, and is interested in having the city as a “secure partner, somebody they know is going to be stable, and not raising rent uncontrollably.”
According to Amtrak’s Great American Stations website, the limestone-faced structure, built by the Benson Construction Co. of Chicago for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, was dedicated in May 1951. Its waiting room is currently used by California Zephyr passengers; from 1988 to 2020, it also housed the Wapello County Historical Museum.
The former CB&Q station in Ottumwa is in the International Style incorporating elongated rectangular stone masonry and large ceiling-to-floor windows on three sides of the waiting room on the east end of the building.
I boarded the ”San Francisco Zephyr” (predecessor of Amtrak’s “California Zephyr”) on the way home for the Christmas Holiday from the University of Iowa in 1975. The train was crowded, late and a mess on board. The connection from Chicago was civil on the “Floridian” in contrast as I found solace travelling 1st class in a former Atlantic Coast Line 14/4 Pullman-Standard sleeping car with the classic octave corrugated stainless steel sidings identifying the P-S design.