Finley Olsen guided trains over a bridge and around some curved track at St. Paul’s Union Depot on Sunday afternoon.

The tracks were wooden and not quite as big as the real ones outside. Dressed in a striped conductor’s hat and overalls that matched his blue glasses, the nearly 3-year-old has been “into trains for quite a while,” said his mother, Molly. Hence the trek from Menomonie, Wis., to visit Choo Choo Bob’s Train Store this weekend as its new Union Depot location opened.

Union Depot boosters are about as thrilled about the model train store as Finley, and they point to its relocation — and the announcement last week that Amtrak’s new Borealis route from St. Paul to Chicago will come and go from Union Depot daily — as signs the historic depot’s fortunes may be on the rise.

“I’ve been here six years and I feel like this is the most excited our team has been,” said Lindsay Boyd, the Depot’s general manager through property manager JLL.

The hundred-year old depot has seen ups and downs since it opened in the 1920s, replacing one destroyed by fire. That decade, nearly 300 trains carrying 20,000 passengers passed through the depot daily.

Within decades of Union Depot’s completion, passenger rail travel fell victim to the automobile, facilitated by the national highway system. “The only tickets you can buy at most train stations now are passages to the past,” the Minneapolis Star published in 1971, the same year Union Depot closed after the last train left the station.

Ramsey County planned to revive Union Depot, spending $243 million to buy and renovate it and turn it into a transit hub that reopened in 2012. In the more than a decade since, it’s seen passenger rail, light-rail and local, regional and long-distance bus routes. Still, some have questioned whether the investment has paid off.

Before the pandemic, the depot helped spur growth in Lowertown. But even then, its sparse foot traffic and quiet, cavernous waiting room suggested county leaders’ hope — that it would become Lowertown’s “living room” — hadn’t fully materialized.

Then the pandemic hit, slowing some of the momentum Union Depot had built. Concerns about safety at the depot heightened with light-rail crime and Lowertown crime problems.

Ramsey County Commissioner Rafael Ortega, who championed the depot’s restoration, said last week that the depot has been rebounding from the pandemic, listing popular events such as its European Christmas Market.

“I think it’s doing very well given two years of being sort of locked up,” he said. “I feel good about it.”

But it’s been a while since Union Depot has had a week as exciting as last, between the train store opening, the Borealis announcement and throngs of visitors to the depot Friday to see a vintage Empress steam train roll through.

Jen Moberg, owner of Choo Choo Bob’s, said the store has considered a move to Union Depot for years. The store left its longtime Marshall Avenue location in St. Paul when COVID-19 hit and opened a pop-up in St. Louis Park in 2022.

Moberg said she’d worried about Union Depot’s lack of foot traffic. By the time a space big enough for Choo Choo Bob’s opened at the station, she felt the move to St. Louis Park had proven the store — and its birthday parties, story times and live music — is a draw in itself.

“We know we can bring in our own foot traffic. We know we can help out the businesses around and in Union Depot,” she said.

The new Borealis train, coming May 21, is also expected to bring traffic. While the Empire Builder leaves St. Paul around 9 a.m. and arrives late at night, the Borealis departs Union Depot midday and arrives from Chicago around dinnertime. Boyd said Amtrak is estimating 170 people, on average, on Borealis trains.

“The second train just makes Union Depot around-the-clock, making sure it’s active all throughout the day,” Ortega said. Discussions about adding trains are in the works. More concretely, the Gold bus rapid transit line from Union Depot to Woodbury is expected to open in March 2025. Someday, the Riverview Corridor is expected — by one mode or another — to connect Union Depot to MSP airport.

Boyd said Union Depot has just one retail/office space vacancy left. Tenants include a bike and coffee shop, a restaurant and others. She teased another big announcement in the works.

“There’s just a lot of really good momentum going on here,” she said. “I am excited for people to be able to enjoy this property as it’s intended and celebrate all the great things that are going on here.”