Historic Railpark & Train Museum

The museum occupies Bowling Green's third Louisville & Nashville depot. The first was built in 1858, before the rails from Nashville arrived on August 10, 1859; Confederate troops retreating in February 1862 burned it along with downtown, and Union occupiers replaced it with a wooden building. L&N president Milton H. Smith long refused the city a new station after citizens chartered a competing railroad, and only after his death in 1921 did the present limestone depot — built of stone from the former White Stone Quarry in southern Warren County — open with much fanfare on October 2, 1925. During the 1930s and 1940s more than 30 passenger trains a day stopped here, among them the Pan-American, Humming Bird, and Azalean, before postwar decline; the last passenger train left on October 6, 1979, and the building joined the National Register of Historic Places that December 18. Saved from the wrecking ball by concerned citizens who transferred it to local government in 1997, the depot underwent a twelve-year, five-phase renovation, and in 2007 the Friends of L&N Depot opened the museum and retail operations now known as the Historic RailPark & Train Museum.