Alexandria Union Station is a historic train station in Alexandria, Virginia south of Washington, D.C. To avoid confusion with nearby Washington Union Station it is usually referred to locally as simply Alexandria Station. Its Amtrak code is ALX.

The station is located at 110 Callahan Drive (below King Street) in the Old Town section of the city. It is serviced by both Amtrak intercity and Virginia Railway Express commuter rail lines. It is located directly across from the King Street stop of the Washington Metro; since the opening of the Metro station in 1983, the city has made the station an intermodal hub for regional mass transit, linking the Amtrak, VRE, and Metro with a number of Alexandria DASH and WMATA bus lines.

The original passenger terminal, a one-story brick building completed in 1905, is still in use. Unlike most stations from the era, it was built in the Federal Revival style. The station was extensively renovated in 1982, with further improvements in the mid-1990s. The stone and concrete Veterans of Foreign Wars memorial was constructed at the station in 1942.

History

In the late 1840s, the City of Alexandria invested in at least five major railroad projects, to link the city with other commercial centers and better compete with Baltimore as a regional industrial and trade center. The numerous competing lines resulted in a mishmash of rails and yards running through the city amidst various railroad mergers and failures.

In 1901, the railroads serving the region, led by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, formed the Richmond-Washington Company to manage traffic between Richmond, Virginia and Washington and build a consolidated railyard, Potomac Yard . The company's plans included construction of a new passenger terminal west of the city, in what was then part of Arlington County—Alexandria did not annex the land until 1915.

Alexandria Union Station was opened on September 15, 1905, and served passenger trains of the C&O, Washington Southern Railway , and Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad until 1971, when ownership of the station was assumed by Amtrak and the rails by CSX Transportation.

References

• Cox, Al. "The Alexandria Union Station" in Historic Alexandria Quarterly, Winter 1996, Vol. 1 No. 1.