Cookeville station

The Cookeville Railroad Depot is a railroad depot in Cookeville, in the U.S. state of Tennessee. Built by the Tennessee Central Railway in 1909, the depot served Cookeville until the 1950s when passenger train service to the city was phased out. The depot was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 and is home to the Cookeville Depot Museum.

Although it was often wrought with financial difficulties and struggled in the face of competition from the larger L&N and Southern railroads, the construction of the Tennessee Central line was an important political and economic milestone for late-19th century Middle Tennessee. The railroad connected the residents of the Upper Cumberland region to the outside world, and gave the region's farmers access to major markets in Nashville and Knoxville. The railroad also brought urbanization and modern development to Cookeville and other cities in the Upper Cumberland and Cumberland Plateau regions.

Construction of the Tennessee Central

After the Civil War, large-scale railroad construction occurred in East Tennessee and the Nashville and Memphis areas, but the difficult terrain of the Highland Rim and the Cumberland Plateau stalled the railroad's advance into the Upper Cumberland region. In the 1870s, the Tennessee and Pacific Railroad built a line connecting Nashville and Lebanon (this line was purchased by the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway in 1877). Politicians and newspaper reporters across the Upper Cumberland region initiated a massive publicity campaign in the early 1880s calling for the railroad to be extended across Middle Tennessee.