While National Train Day is May 8, Toledo's holds theirs a week before so they can get a train display from Amtrak. Otherwise Amtrak trains are spoken for at events in larger cities like Chicago, Washington DC and elsewhere. Yet Toledo's is one of the largest NTD events in the country thanks to the tremendous work by volunteers, including support from the Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments (TMACOG), All Aboard Ohio, the Northwest Ohio Passenger Rail Association and others.

 

Here are photos I shot at the Toledo NTD May 1, 2010. It attracts thousands of visitors each year. This year's appeared to have the largest turnout yet! See for yourself...

 

The event is held at the former Central Union Terminal, now called MLK Plaza. It is owned by the port authority and has offices for several agencies, as well as a staffed Amtrak station on the track level. This is the former station concourse on the third level/street level where most of the NTD displays were located, including a huge model railroad layout set up by the Swanton Model RR Club...

 

 

This is the former concourse that led out above the station tracks. Passengers use ramps to track level which are accessed from the left and right sides of this concourse. Now it is used to host various events, including vendors and displays at the NTD...

 

Looking west from the old passenger concourse, down the Norfolk Southern mainline toward Chicago, 234 miles away. In addition to about 80 daily freight trains, Amtrak operates four daily passenger trains on this route and stop at Toledo each day (er, night) to serve about 60,000 passengers per year...

 

Might more people use the trains if they were more conveniently scheduled to serve Toledo between the hours of 6 a.m. to midnight rather than midnight to 6 a.m.? Almost certainly! How do we know? Because Toledo saw 100,000 Amtrak travelers per year in the 1990s when its trains served the city at more convenient hours. And, on Saturday, people waited in line for more than an hour to get on an Amtrak display train parked at the station! Here's what the line looked like...

 

Children of all ages peered into one of Amtrak's locomotive that was recently refurbished...

 

On board one of the Superliner coaches, All Aboard Ohio and NARP Treasurer Ken Clifford tries out one of the coach seats to enjoy the view of Toledo, Ohio in the daytime hours...

 

In the next car in the display, one of Amtrak's newly refurbished Cross Country Cafe cars (former Superliner double-deck lounge car), Ken Clifford chats with an Amtrak lead service attendant...

 

I shamelessly enlisted some of the visitors to cop a squat in the Cross Country Cafe to act as if they're passengers on their way to someplace fun and special. I hate when people take pictures of the insides of passenger trains before or after the passengers are on board. It gives a bad impression, the same as when people take pictures on city streets when no one else is around...

 

Looking out the back of the Cross Country Cafe car, we see the eastern approach tracks to Toledo's MLK Plaza station. Just 107 miles east is Cleveland, and beyond that are the East Coast cities of Boston, New York City and Washington DC -- the eastern termini of the Amtrak trains that serve Toledo each night. All Aboard!!

BTW:  Toledo Union Station will celebrate it's 60th year of service this September.  It was the last new train station built in Ohio when it was opened by the New York Central in 1950.

 

Great pix KJP.  I was there as well and was very impressed with the turnout.  I am told the unofficial headcount was almost 5,000.  Last year the event drew 3,500 visitors.  That kind of attendance growth sends a strong message about Ohioan's interest in more and better passenger trains.

Excellent event! It's nice to see a photo of a shiny Amtrak locomotive; usually when I see them in regular service, they're splattered with winter grime or summer bugs:

 

 

The restoration of Toledo's Central Union Terminal after years of desecration by Penn Central and Conrail turned out rather stunning, and considering the marginal amount of use it gets, the platform area is well maintained and remarkably free of litter, tagging, and other vandalism.

 

The last I knew, there were plans to co-locate Greyhound there. Has that happened yet?

 

I don't watch TV, so I might have missed something ( :| ), but so far as I know, National Train Day passed with nary a peep from the media in Fort Wayne.

Greyhound Lines has a long-term lease with Greyhound Properties for use of the downtown Toledo station. So they're not getting out of there anytime soon.