Then and Now: Tracks to Union Station

Spokane’s Union Station took more than a decade of work by Robert E. Strahorn and others to create a multi-line passenger depot and his own project, the North Coast Railway, which he hoped would be the fastest route from Spokane to Portland.

Strahorn and his wife, Carrie Adell Strahorn, had spent the 1870s and 1880s writing about Western expansion and promoting the Northwest through newspapers and magazines that circulated back East. Strahorn worked as a publicist for the Union Pacific railroad, run by Edward H. Harriman, which was laying track from hubs in Omaha and Kansas City to the Northwest, but had yet to reach Spokane.

After the financial panic of 1893 and a drop in silver prices, Strahorn worked as an investment trader in Boston, but returned to Spokane around 1900 and began quietly working on a new passenger depot. The Great Northern depot was already on Havermale Island and the Northern Pacific station was in the heart of downtown.

The Milwaukee Road was building toward Spokane from the east and the Union Pacific was ready to connect from the south.

Early on, he quietly bought land and rights of way into Spokane. He negotiated the purchase of Spokane’s 1894 City Hall so the station’s tracks could run along Trent Avenue, now Spokane Falls Boulevard.

Gossip swirled around Strahorn, because a depot, miles of new track, bridges and an elevated trestle downtown would cost a fortune.

Strahorn said little, earning his nickname, “The Sphinx.” He used discrete land agents and paid for land purchases with personal checks. He hoped to avoid interference by rail baron James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railroad.

The money behind his efforts was coming straight from the Union Pacific’s Harriman. The funds purchased the right of way along the north bank of the river and a spectacular steel bridge that turned and crossed the Spokane River at Latah Creek at what is today High Bridge Park.

On Sept. 14, 1914, the Union Station opened with a Milwaukee Road train from the east passing a Union Pacific train from the southwest. The station, the tracks and the trestles were torn down for Expo ’74.