More than 50 train stations across the Natural State are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Only six still see passenger service. That's a sad fact of travel for Arkansans who remember the pleasures of riding the rails.
But railroading's glory days from the last several decades of the 19th century into the 1950s can be evoked at many other former passenger depots. They've been preserved by conversion to a variety of uses.
A dozen or more are open to sightseers as visitor centers and/or museums focused on railroading along with other topics. They make feel-good targets for day trips — and perhaps a revelation to younger family members who've never enjoyed a ride on an actual train.
Along with the half-dozen functioning Amtrak depots (in Walnut Ridge, Little Rock, Malvern, Arkadelphia, Hope and Texarkana), some are occupied by private businesses, chambers of commerce or government offices. Others are vacant. At least three have been converted to private homes. All echo the past to some degree, as noted in an Arkansas Historic Preservation Program posting by William D. Baker:
"Like the county courthouses, post offices and city halls of the past, the local railroad depot developed as a meeting and gathering place for the community, and the arrivals of passenger trains became major events of the day.
"Townfolk met, noticed who arrived and departed, helped unload freight and picked up mail. The standardization of railroad schedules was the impetus for the development of national time zones, and for the first time Arkansas communities abandoned their local systems for the Central Time Zone."
The passion for model railroading that some grown-ups have carried from their childhood Lionel and American Flyer layouts is manifest at Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott. The station, which saw its last Missouri Pacific passenger run in 1972, displays a scaled-down locomotive and tender built years ago by a local enthusiast to run on track in his yard.
In Russellville's Historic Missouri-Pacific Train Depot, opened in 1917, four rooms restored as a museum give a clear sense of what railroad travel in the South was like during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation.
Southern law and custom back then mandated separate waiting rooms for white and Black passengers. In Russellville's whites-only room, the transom hardware dates to 1917. In the space for "colored" passengers, the restroom mirror is probably the original. The impressive timepiece in the station master's office is an eight-day railway clock. Dating to 1910, it still gets the needed winding once a week.
In the state's far north at Mammoth Spring, the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railroad Depot's segregated waiting rooms have been restored as they looked after the station opened in 1885 for tourists arriving to enjoy the spa waters. A dozen life-size mannequins add to the station's sense of time travel.
Brinkley's Central Delta Depot Museum is housed in what was touted as the Rock Island Line's most impressive depot in eastern Arkansas when it opened in 1912. Its spacious wing design included freight rooms at each end. Displayed on the grounds is a smaller century-old frame depot relocated from the town of Monroe. There's also a Southern Pacific caboose, one of the last built for that line in the 1980s.
Among other former depots with historical displays, the handsome Union Pacific station built in 1912 in downtown Helena (now Helena-West Helena) houses one of Arkansas' most notable museums, the Delta Cultural Center.
Exhibits or other visitor services also occupy former depots in places like Decatur, Earle, Eureka Springs, Glenwood, Gurdon, McGehee, Mena and Pine Bluff. Not all the displays focus on railroad history. But the settings call to mind the heyday of train travel.
Information on surviving train stations in Arkansas is available at arkansasheritage.com. Hours vary at depots open to visitors, with admission generally free.