District of Columbia

Union Station wasn’t Washington’s first rail station, but it was the fix for what came before. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s Washington Branch opened in 1835 as the capital’s first rail line, and over the following decades scattered depots came to crowd the city’s streets. Congress authorized a grand new terminal to replace them, and Union Station opened in 1908, designed by architect Daniel Burnham to consolidate the capital’s railroads under one roof and eliminate dangerous street-level crossings, a landmark of the City Beautiful movement. More than a century later, it remains one of the country’s busiest rail hubs, still connecting the region’s commuters and freight to the network first built in the 1830s.