The Amshack era in Durham railroading ended this week, with the opening of the town's new, permanent and spacious passenger depot in the Walker Warehouse at West Village downtown.

A crowd of railroad brass, train buffs, reporters, photographers and even a dozen or so passengers were on hand when the diesel engine City of Asheville and three coaches rolled in at 7:20 Wednesday morning.

Two minutes later, right on schedule, the train pulled off for Burlington, Greensboro and points south. At the same time, workmen were already dismantling the doublewide trailer right across the track that had welcomed riders to Durham since 1996.

"I was really impressed," city councilman Mike Woodard said after inspecting the new station Wednesday. "It just puts such a nice face on Durham."

Passengers board from and get off onto a 605-foot long canopied platform that leads into and out of a waiting room reminiscent of train stations years and years ago.

From high, exposed-beam wooden ceiling to terrazzo floor, the first impression is vastness -- especially compared with the "interim" station where passengers frequently endured a standing-room-only wait.

"It's a gracious space," said project manager Craig Newton.

The waiting room occupies 6,000 square feet, the entire new station 10,000 -- ten times the room the old Amshack afforded.

For those old enough to remember, the next impression is déjà vu -- wooden benches (though considerably more comfortable than in the days gone by), dark beadboard wainscoting and information racks resembling old-timey post office pigeonholes. The presence of a self-service ticket kiosk does nothing to detract from the mood.

"It gives our passengers an opportunity to come into a comfortable environment, a somewhat nostalgic railroad environment," said Michael Jerew, Amtrak's district operations manager.

Nostalgia, in the form of historic preservation, is a mark of the state transportation department's program of upgrading and promoting rail travel. Since the late 1990s, DOT has rehabilitated more than a dozen vintage stations along the state's rail corridors -- along the way winning an award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The rail revival comes far too late to save Durham's grand old Italian Renaissance Union Station, opened in 1905 at the foot of Church Street near the courthouse.

Commercial passenger service to Durham was discontinued in 1965 and, shortly thereafter, the station fell to make way for the Downtown Loop and a parking deck. When Amtrak began running its Carolinian through Durham in 1990, the city provided the first "Amshack" -- a bus-stop shelter on Pettigrew Street. That was replaced by the larger, enclosed module on Chapel Hill Street in 1996, but the nickname carried over.

Now, Durham has a station more suited to its stature as the fifth-busiest passenger stop in North Carolina: 50,000 travelers got on and off here in fiscal 2007-08, said Joan Bagherpour, spokeswoman for DOT's rail division.

The upfit cost $2.25 million, she said. A federal program for traffic decongestion provided $1.25 for the platform and canopy and a DOT fund spent $1 million on interior renovation. DOT pays 75 percent of the rent and operating cost, with the city picking up the rest and donating land for the parking lot, Bagherpour said.

Currently, the station serves four trains a day: the Piedmont, running between Raleigh and Charlotte, and the Carolinian, between Charlotte and New York. DOT and Amtrak plan to add a third Raleigh-Charlotte daily by the end of this year.

"It offers travel options," Bagherpour said. "It's a greener way to travel, less congestion on the highways and we're trying to allow for a more multi-modal transportation system throughout the state."