Amtrak's main station in Pittsburgh is a federal dump -- and has been for decades
Here’s an update from May 6 — an excellent KDKA-TV story done by my pal, investigative reporter Andy Sheehan.
I took this photo of Pittsburgh's pathetic Amtrak station in its shockingly dead downtown on Tuesday April 20 at about noon.
Pittsburgh's 'Union Station' is a longtime crummy civic embarrassment on Grant Street, across from the neoned bus station.
Amtrak's Post Office-like lobby is buried under the beautiful Beaux-Arts architecture of the Pennsylvanian, which a century ago was the city's very busy Union Station.
The Pennsylvanian is now a pretty fancy apartment building and its spectacular rotunda where hundreds of passengers once waited for trains is now a popular choice for wedding receptions.
Just three trains operate out of the city each day -- Pittsburgh to New York City in the morning (9-plus hours) and a west bound train at midnight that'll get you to Chicago and beyond. There’s a Washington DC train, too, but good luck finding out more info; as anyone who's ever used it knows, the Amtrak website is one of the most useless and annoying sites in the WWW.
As an Uber driver, I occasionally picked up Amtrak passengers.
Getting in and out of the tight labyrinth of pillars with a car was always precarious and sometimes impossible when there were other cars. The two apparently permanent dumpsters don't help. (The appliance on the ground is a dead washer/dryer combo from the Pennsylvanian).
I wanted to go in and check out the 'grandeur' of Amtrak's lobby but the doors were locked. The station is open only from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. During the day it's locked up. No ATM. No Wi-fi.
No one was inside the Amtrak office at noon -- except when I opened a side door I found a young guy casually painting a wall.
He agreed with me that the place was an embarrassing dump inside and especially outside, but said recently some engineers/architect types had visited and taken 3-D photos of the place for a planned remodeling.
I didn't call Amtrak officials to find out if that's true or if any remodeling is dependent on President Biden's generous infrastructure bill.
But unless they also do something to beautify the station's hideous entrance, which the city of Pittsburgh apparently is content to be a permanent eyesore, fixing the inside is going to be a waste of government money -- which is about the only thing Amtrak seems to be good at.