June 5, 2017
The day before it first opened for passengers on a regular basis, a newly built Amtrak train station in the city of Pontiac, Illinois, was inaugurated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and plenty of praise. Approximately 75 people attended this event. The funding for this station was a federal grant provided to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) as part of a larger high-speed rail program for that region of the United States.
The present-day Pontiac station is served by the following long-distance Amtrak routes: the Lincoln Service, a 284-mile (457-kilometer) link between Chicago and St. Louis; and the Texas Eagle, a 1,306-mile (2,102-kilometer) link between Chicago and San Antonio. The current version of Pontiac station replaced a depot that been built a block away in 1901 as a stop for the Chicago and Alton Railroad.
Bob Russell, the mayor of Pontiac from 2009 to 2019, took time during the festivities for the new station to highlight this structure’s overall significance. “This is a big deal for our city,” he said. “We have a lot of visitors from all over the world and we have a lot of business people traveling through from Chicago to [the state’s capital city of] Springfield. We are within one mile [1.6 kilometers] of being right in the middle of those two.”
Randy Blankenhorn, who served as secretary of IDOT from 2015 to 2018, also underscored the importance and potential benefits of the new Pontiac station. “This is a major milestone for the state of Illinois,” he asserted. Blankenhorn noted as well, “This building will become a centerpiece of downtown Pontiac and provide travelers a safer, more reliable and convenient option to get to where they want to go.”
In his account of the ceremony for the new station, Kevin Barlow of the Illinois-based newspaper Pantagraph reported on the wide range of innovations and amenities both within the building and its immediate vicinity. He stated, “The Pontiac station includes a waiting room, interior and exterior seating, free Wi-Fi, bicycle parking, a passenger pick-up and drop-off zone, modern security systems, bike and pedestrian paths, and various energy-efficient features.” This station was designed by Legat Architects, a firm that is based in Chicago.
Photo Credit: TraiNerd120 (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
For more information on Pontiac station, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac_station_(Illinois)
Transportation History 
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