Terminal Station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a former railroad station, and now hotel, which was once owned and operated by the Southern Railway, and is currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The station is currently operated under the name The Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel and is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.HistoryThe station was opened in 1909 and was the largest station in Chattanooga's history. The Terminal Station was the first train station in the south to help open a pathway to connect the north from the south, mostly to connect the city of Cincinnati, to Chattanooga. The original Chattanooga Union Station, built in 1858, (demolished in 1973) and a second station, built in 1882, were too small to handle the rapid expansion in the railroad network serving Chattanooga. Chattanooga was becoming a main port and hub for supplies and people to come through, so it was decided that a station should be built to be bigger than previously planned. The construction on the second station, or Terminal Station, began in 1906 at the cost of $1.5 million. Terminal Station was initially envisioned to be a train station that would deliver supplies and small packages, and then it was decided that it would also serve passenger trains. The Terminal Train Station eventually started to serve, on average, fifty passenger trains per day, and even greeted presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. However, this does not include the traffic and materials that were also coming in due to the non-passenger trains.
