The Chicago and Northwestern Railroad Depot is a historic former railroad station in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. This masterpiece of Romanesque architecture was designed by Charles Sumner Frost in 1891 and stands as a monument to the past. The building is located on the southeast corner of Forest Avenue and Brooke Street.
The station has roots with the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. A near-identical twin station was built in DeKalb, Illinois, in the same year of 1891. The depot served trains such as the Flambeau 400 and Peninsula 400 until it closed in 1975, well after most intercity passenger service in the United States was turned over to Amtrak in 1971, which never used this station.
A meticulous restoration and repurposing began in 2021. The depot re-opened to the public in 2025 as The Passenger Lounge, a live music venue and event space built into the passenger portion of the building. The former right-of-way is now a rail trail.
The depot was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 10, 1990. It remains a prominent structure in the community, preserving the history of the Milwaukee Road branch line that once terminated at the station on Forest Street.
Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons
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