The former railroad terminal opened in 1900 to serve the passenger operations of the eight railroads then providing passenger service to Nashville, Tennessee. The station is located on Broadway at Tenth Avenue.
The station is an example of late-Victorian Gothic Revival architecture. The tower was originally topped by a bronze statue of the Roman god Mercury, but this ornamentation was toppled in a storm in 1951. Station usage reached its peak during World War II when it was the shipping-out point for tens of thousands of U.S. troops and the site of a USO canteen. Usage declined steadily after the war. By the late 1970s service was discontinued and the station was abandoned entirely. In the 1980s the main structure reopened as a historic hotel. Finding a modern use for the train shed where passengers had waited to board proved to be a more difficult challenge. When plans of creating a farmers’ market with the shelter failed to come to fruition, the structure was demolished after its design had been carefully recorded.
Train shed at Nashville’s Union Station wasn’t demolished, it caught fire and burned in the summer of 1996.