2-496-302 - Curt Teich Postcard Archives/Heritage Images

Switch yards and Union Station, St Louis, Missouri, USA, 1910. Vintage postcard. Dozens of rail cars are visible on the multiple tracks and a road bridge crosses over the yard. Opened in 1894, St Louis' Union Station became the world's largest and busiest railway station, handling 100,000 passengers a day in the 1940s. As passenger rail travel declined in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the vast station became obsolete and expensive to maintain, and the last train departed in 1978. In the 1980s Union Station was redeveloped as a hotel, shopping and entertainment complex.