Historic Lenox Train Station

The tracks stretch away from the platform, and standing here on a summer morning a visitor can see what Edith Wharton would have seen when she stepped off the train for a weekend in the country.

The Berkshire Scenic Railway has restored the old Lenox Station to the way it looked in 1903. Today, it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and travelers can take a guided tour of the station and its historic railroad equipment and ride a Jitney on the museum grounds, even in the cab of the locomotive.

Historic train rides run in the northern Berkshires, from Adams to North Adams on the Hoosac Valley Line. The Lenox station is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday from the end of May through the first weekend of September, and it also serves as the museum shop, with wooden train sets, puzzles and more.

A conductor waits for passengers to board a historic train for a ride with Berkshire Scenic Railway.
Photo by Susan Geller

Berkshire railway history

Trains have run from New York, New Haven and Hartford to Lenox since 1850, until the passenger lines closed a century later. A local man, John W. Herbert, wanted to bring them back. He was a U.S. Air Force officer and 30-year veteran of the General Electric Company, and he founded the museum in 1984. It has run for more than 30 years as a labor of love, fueled largely by volunteers.

The historic Lenox depot also houses the Yokun Block Station, a replica of the Rising block station in the village of Housatonic. In the days of telegraph, before radio, the block station would coordinate the movements of trains sharing a network of single tracks. The renovated block station here has a a working vintage railroad communication system and acts as a living exhibit and the operations base for the museum’s train crews.

BTW Berkshires
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