The Durham Museum preserves one of Omaha’s most impressive railway artifacts before you even reach a display case: Union Station. The station opened in 1931, when seven railroads served it. Gilbert Stanley Underwood and Company designed the building in the Art Deco style, with attention to such small details as light fixtures and doorplates. That makes the station especially rewarding to explore at two scales. First take in the effect of the public rooms, then look closely at the hardware and furnishings used in an ordinary journey.
The word union describes a station shared by multiple railroads. In Omaha, the arrangement involved more than one building. A concourse constructed in 1937 connected Union Station with the Burlington Depot across the railway yard. Travelers reached trains from the connection above the tracks. Consider how that layout helped passengers negotiate a large and busy terminal, where simply finding the correct platform was a job the architecture had to solve.
The railway service ended in 1971, but the original Track 1 now forms part of the museum’s Trish and Dick Davidson Trackside Gallery. Its displays include three passenger cars, a locomotive and a caboose. Those vehicles make a helpful follow-up to the waiting room upstairs: after seeing where passengers gathered, you can consider what they encountered once aboard. The caboose introduces a different working environment and gives the railway story some balance beyond passenger travel.
The Durham is also a museum of Omaha history. Its broader permanent exhibits include a recreation of the Buffett Grocery storefront and material from the Byron Reed collection. That variety helps place the station within a city rather than turning it into an isolated architectural showpiece. For a rail-focused visit, give yourself time for the building, the trackside collection and the exhibits about Omaha’s growth. Those three stops explain why a city invested in a monumental passenger terminal and why the building remained worth saving when its original service ended.
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Researched November 2026.
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More railroad museums in Nebraska
- Cody Park Railroad Museum — North Platte: Outdoor locomotive and depot collection
- Rock Island Railroad Depot Museum — Fairbury: Depot and railroad history museum
- Stuhr Museum — Railroad Heritage — Grand Island: Living-history museum with railroad heritage
- Trails and Rails Museum — Kearney: Local history museum with railroad collection
- All 5 railroad museums and sites in Nebraska
Keep exploring
- All heritage sites — museums, stations and landmarks
- Midwest — the trains you can ride in the region