On March 2, 1906, the Goldsboro Union Station Company was
chartered to build a new station, which was to be a union of passenger rail services from
Atlantic and North Carolina,
Atlantic Coast Line (ACL), and
Southern railroads. Formerly, all three railroads had their own separate freight operations immediately north of downtown with a small Union Depot in the middle of downtown. The site selected was at the foot of Walnut Street on a spur line that bypassed west of downtown. Construction began in August 1907 and was completed in June 1909, at a cost $72,024. The architectural design is credited to
J.F. Leitner's firm, Leitner & Wilkins. It is a two-story brick building, seven bays wide and two bays deep, with a hip roof, flanked by one-story gabled brick wings. It features a three-story central tower and one-story front and rear porches. The ACL operated trains on the former
Wilmington and Weldon Railroad between
Wilmington (the original headquarters of the ACL) and a point near
Wilson, where a connection was made to the
Richmond–
Florida main line. The Southern Railway operated passenger trains such as the northern branch of the Cincinnati-bound
Carolina Special from Goldsboro through
Raleigh and
Durham to
Greensboro. Into the early 1950s the
Atlantic and East Carolina Railway ran a daily passenger train from Goldsboro, North Carolina southeast to
Morehead City on the
Crystal Coast. The last passenger train to use Goldsboro Union Station was discontinued in 1968. That train was a
Rocky Mount station -
Wilmington Union Station Seaboard Coast Line route that originated in connection with the
Champion southbound, and the
Palmetto northbound. Goldsboro Union Station was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 1977, by that time the property changed hands several times and was currently owned by Goldsboro Builders Supply. On August 17, 2007, the
North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) announced that it had purchased the facility and adjoining acreage to preserve and adaptively reuse as a modern multimodel center. After providing
stabilization of the historic building, NCDOT passed ownership to the City of Goldsboro in December 2008. In August 2014, construction began on the Gateway Transfer Center, a bus station located north-end of the property. It was opened in September 2015 and was renamed the GWTA Bus Transfer Center. ==GWTA Bus Transfer Center==