Even as Burlington officials were approving construction of the new depot at Sheridan ( Wyoming ), they were suddenly and unexpectedly faced with an immediate need for a new depot and division office building at Galesburg, the bustling hub of Lines East, for on April 27, 1911, the classic Victorian brick depot there ( Galesburg's second Burlington depot, complete with a striking but purely ornamental tower that made it one of the city's tallest structures ) was gutted by fire, leaving nothing standing but a shell of scorched brick walls.

Noted architect Heny Raeder was retained to design the replacement structure. Two stories tall, but topped by a low, tiled-covered hip roof that made it appear tall, the depot measured an impressive 64 feet 3 inches wide and 233 feet long, its footprint encompassing 14,800 square feet. Constructed of brownish red brick manufactured locally by Purington Brick Company ( best known for the brick pavers used on Line East depot platforms ) the structure was erected just north of the Seminary and South Street site of the old depot, and its construction occupied the latter part of 1911 and virtually all of 1912. Completed at a cost of estimated by the railroad at $150,000.00 - plus and by local sources at closer to $225,000.00, the new depot was formally dedicated in early 1913.

By the time the Burlington Northern was created in 1970, the Galesburg Division no longer existed, and all Lines East dispatching had been done from a consolidated facility near Clyde Yard near Cicero, Illinois for two years. A building as large as the 622,000 cubic-foot Galesburg depot was costly to maintain and expensive to heat in the winter, particularly for the minimal use the railroad was getting from it. Consequently as the BN began developing plans for an $80 million expansion and modernization of its facilities in Galesburg - plans that would include razing the power plant that furnished steam to heat the depot - the 1912 building became a liability to the railroad. The city wanted to save the structure and investigated ways this might be accomplished. But in the end, the building's great size was its own downfall. Even if the railroad had given the structure to the city, heating and maintaining it in its current condition would have been prohibitively expensive. And renovating it, installing a new heating system, and bringing the other utilities up to code, would have been just as costly, with all the expense incurred up front before any of the benefits could be realized. Consequently, with little advance warning, the railroad undertook demolition of the historic structure in May 1983, 71 years after the massive depot entered service, and Galesburg lost a major landmark.

The photo illustrates the Heywood-Wakefield Sleepy Hollow seat. Typical railroad coach seats were little more than padded benches, so the development of a comfortable seat was an innovation at the time. Life Magazine ran an article on February 11, 1946 about the seat , and here it is, entitled; Hooton's Chair Harvard Anthropologist measures 3,867 people for a railway seat:

The science of sitting down inched forward a bit last week. The Heywood-Wakefield Company in Gardner, Mass., biggest maker of railway coach seats, perfected one that more nearly fits the seated human body than any yet made. The company calls it the Sleepy Hollow Chair. Nearly everyone else is calling it the Hooton Chair. Reason for this name was that for months Harvard University's well-known anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton, and his staff of statisticians had been prodding and measuring 3,867 volunteers and compiling statistics to determine what U.S. travelers should have under them. His mass of results were used in making a new seat scientifically tailored to the average railroad rider. Meanwhile, experimenting with a wooden chair filled with sand on which people left the impressions of their posteriors, the Heywood-Wakefield Co. arrived at a set of conclusions which, to their dismay, were precisely the same as Dr. Hooton's. The photo captions stated: Fattest man tested in Dr. Hooton's special measuring chair was Adam Reimer, who weighed 325 pounds and measured 56 inches around the hips. Ordinary railway seat is too hard, too vertical for ample Adam Reimer. Few abnormal sizes were measured because they complicated Hooton's computations. New railway seat fits Mr. Reimer better. The deeper cushioning gives with his curves and the inclined seat distributes some of the load against the chair back.

Reprint of article here: http://streamlinermemories.info/Eastern/LifeSleepyHollow.jpg