Loveland C&S Rail Depot

Whether it was stagecoaches on the Overland Trail, steam locomotives bringing crops to market, or automobiles carrying tourists to nearby Rocky Mountain National Park, the city of Loveland has long served as a transportation hub along Colorado’s Front Range. The city’s Colorado & Southern Railway Depot, built in 1902 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, is a testament to Loveland’s transportation history. Today the historic depot at East Fifth Street and Railroad Avenue houses two local businesses—Sports Station American Grill, which opened in 2006, and The Armory, a community office space that opened in 2012.

History

Loveland was built around its first train station, a single-story red brick building that went up in 1878 to serve William A.H. Loveland’s Colorado Central Railroad (CCR). The city quickly developed into a shipping hub for the region’s agricultural products, and by the turn of the century, it had outgrown the original station. In 1901 the Great Western Sugar Company built a beet factory in Loveland, resulting in a huge increase in freight traffic to and from the city. While the factory was being built, the Colorado & Southern Railway (C&S), the CCR’s successor, laid a spur line to the factory. C&S officials also announced that a new depot was in the works.

Colorado & Southern architect Charles B. Martin drew up plans for a new two-building depot in the Romanesque Revival style, with arches playing a prominent role in the design. Bricks from the original CCR depot were included in the new station’s platform, and the new buildings—one for passengers and one for freight—were completed in November 1902. Great Western Sugar incorporated its own rail line that year, building northeast from Loveland to Eaton and south to Longmont. This put the Loveland C&S depot at the heart of the Front Range sugar beet industry, but sugar beets were not the only precious cargo unloaded at the depot.

By the 1910s, the Loveland C&S depot served as a launch point for tourists traveling west to the mountains. Beginning in 1906, the Loveland-Estes Park Transportation Company used Stanley Steamers—steam-powered automobiles invented by Freelan Stanley—to shuttle passengers from the C&S depot to Estes Park. By 1912 the C&S was running four passenger trains daily from Denver, two trains from Greeley, and one from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to its Loveland depot, where passengers were then driven to the Stanley Hotel and other destinations. Travel to Estes Park increased after the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915.

With the rise in automobile ownership over the next few decades, passenger train travel dropped off sharply. Loveland’s freight traffic also declined as the regional economy diversified, and the depot closed in 1980. Since then, the depot buildings have housed a variety of businesses, including restaurants, shops, and offices. The Loveland C&S depot was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Today

Today the former passenger building of the Loveland depot houses Sports Station American Grill, and the former freight building is home to The Armory, a shared workspace for freelancers and other professionals. The restaurant kept the original benches lining the building’s interior perimeter but transformed the platform into an enclosed play area for children.