The Durham Museum
Omaha’s restored 1931 Union Station makes transportation history inseparable from the city that railroads helped build.
Artwork inspired by Eugene Kingman
The Durham’s Great Hall is the opening artifact: terrazzo floor, sculpted plaster, ticket counters, and monumental waiting room establish the scale of passenger rail before the galleries address regional communities, commerce, migration, and daily life. Restored train cars make the physical constraints and rituals of rail travel unusually tangible.
Do not rush downstairs immediately. First read the Great Hall as a working transportation space, then compare its civic optimism with the labor, displacement, growth, and segregation contained in the wider history. Temporary exhibitions and a working soda fountain make a two-hour visit easy to extend.
- Building
- 1931 Omaha Union Station
- Signature space
- Art Deco Great Hall
- Don’t miss
- Restored passenger cars and streetcar
Quick guide
- Route question
- 1931 Omaha Union Station ↔ Art Deco Great Hall
- Final evidence
- Connect passenger rail with migration, commerce, segregation, and regional growth.
Quick guide
- Great Hall
- Read the terrazzo, ticket windows, plasterwork, and waiting-room scale as one artifact.
- Railcars
- Step through restored cars to compare privacy, comfort, labor, and class in motion.
- Omaha
- Connect passenger rail with migration, commerce, segregation, and regional growth.
- Pace
- See the station before descending; return upstairs after the galleries change its meaning.
Good to know
The restored Great Hall is the museum’s largest original artifact, preserving the scale, ornament, and civic ambition of Omaha’s passenger-rail era.
Notice these
- 1931 Omaha Union Station
- Art Deco Great Hall
- Restored passenger cars and streetcar