Project Description

• Introduction
• Arrival/Decompression/Reception
• Orientation
• Interpretation
• Dining, Retail & Entertainment
• Terminus

Dining, Retail & Entertainment
Financial sustainability is best achieved through the introduction of diverse revenue-generating venues, inspired by and responsive to the thematic core of the Center. These self-contained attractions encompassed by the site, are likely to attract a wide ranging residential audience for whom the venues are an important community resource.

The 6,000 square foot W of A Restaurant/Café is ideal for club luncheons, catered business meetings as well as formal and informal parties. The kitchen would support events programmed for the outdoor plazas and elsewhere on the site.

Open to the brick arched wall at the south end of the adjoining Car Shed, the Café offers diners a regularly scheduled "Sound & Light" show illuminating four historic locomotives and a number of related artifacts visible through the glazed arches.

Housed in two historically re-created structures, parallel to the Café and Car Shed, the RailMall evokes a sense of fantasy in the form of a macro-size "model railroad" environment. The giant model is the setting for two levels of specialty shopping, food court, children’s rides and related amusements. Insofar as possible, retail shops will be unique to the Center and contextual to the project themes.

A major entertainment venue will be housed in the adaptively re-used AmeriCold refrigeration building, its multi-story central bay becoming the auditorium for a larger format theater featuring a specially produced historical rail panorama coordinated with a changing palette of popular Imax films. Interactive presentations illustrating and explaining the history of refrigeration engineering will occupy other sections of the restored structure.

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| Development Plans | Economics | Conclusion |