Minnesota city builds “railroad depot” water pump station

mock train station building — Is it a train station? Or, is it a municipal water pump station disguised as a train depot? To honor its railroad heritage, Eden Prairie, Minn., had a replica of its old Minneapolis & St. Louis station constructed. Inside, however, are not the trappings of a regular railroad depot. The building houses a new water pumping station for the city. Oertel Architects

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. – It’s been decades since the last Chicago & North Western freight train rumbled through Eden Prairie on former Minneapolis & St. Louis tracks, and even longer since the M&StL depot stood along the right-of-way. Yet if you look along that right-of-way today, there’s a new “station” – a replica of a train depot that also has a functional purpose. It serves as the pump station and holds mechanical equipment associated with a new water reservoir that the city of Eden Prairie has constructed nearby to keep up with Eden Prairie’s population and demand for drinking water and fire service. The “depot” includes a platform and a short piece of track.

This year will come another addition – a replica water tank. The Eden Prairie City Council has a $92,000 contract with International Tank and Pipe Company to design and prepare for construction a 10-foot-tall wooden water tank that will complete the replica project, the Eden Prairie Local News reported. Under the contract, materials for the tank will arrive in May, and then installed at the site. The original depot also had a water tank.

During the planning for the reservoir, city officials decided to give the pump station a design that borrows from the former railroad depot and water tank that once stood a couple of hundred yards away, and use it to educate residents about Eden Prairie’s railroad history. Contractors used modern-day fiber-cement and metal building materials to approximate the wooden siding and shingles that composed the historic depot. “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to recreate some of the history of this land?’” Director of Public Works Robert Ellis told the Local News.

Other additions remaining in the project include interpretive signage to describe Eden Prairie’s railroad history.

Eden Prairie was once on the main line of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway, which was based in Minneapolis. Freight trains operated from Cedar Lake Yard in Minneapolis through Hopkins and Eden Prairie down steep Chaska Hill, crossed the Minnesota River, and headed south toward Iowa and into Peoria, Ill. The railroad touted itself as “The Peoria Gateway” encouraging shippers to use M&StL avoiding Chicago rail congestion. Chicago & North Western purchased M&StL in November 1960; the line through Eden Prairie was abandoned in 1991.