ways to travel faster and farther than the train travel. so that had started to decline after world war ii, the automobile travel when people can could go and do their own thing, drive route 66 and that whole lifestyle. with that 1971 legislation, all passenger travel outside of amtrak stopped and that's when the station stopped. may 2, 1971, the last train came out of union station at 2:00 a.m. and that was the end of passenger travel. the station was closed. for the past 40 years it had never closed its doors, 24-hour operation. they didn't even have a lock. they had to call a locksmith to close the doors. -- doors because nobody knew where the keys were. it had never needed to close. that's when omaha banded together to make sure that this building was not destroyed as one of the premiere art deco

buildings in town. that's where the museum comes into play, to make sure that this is preserved. union pacific is still nationally a huge freight travel railroad and so they still do a lot of freight back and forth. you are still shipping in union pacific. they're one of our largest companies here in omaha. they have not dwindled. their passenger service may have ended but their service to the community is still going strong. when you walk into the building, it is definitely awe-inspiring. i've worked here seven years and am ll look up amazed when i see this. we hope visitors, when they come, leave with an appreciation of not only what union pacific did for this area ut the history and people of the -- that built omaha over

the years. announcer: our next stop is the durham museum and its exhibit n how the growth of rrd fueled the meat packing an stockyards industries in the early 20th strrment >> the union station operated until may, 197167 the last train left out of here may 2, and it sat vacant. we made union station our home nd now it's an -- a museum preserving open ome history. this exhibit focuses on livestock. very important industry for omaha, south omaha as a city and then eventually for the city as a whole. >> cattle marketing centers are strategically located and omaha serves a large western area. its holding pens have handled

more than 100 million cattle since its founding more than 80 years ago. here's our livestock train, right on schedule, early morning arrival. >> the livestock industry begins in 19 -- 1887 as a fattening station. a place for cattle to get fed before they head to a stockyards to be slaughtered, and eventually this turns into the stockyards as we know the omaha stockyards in the 1880's. 1883 is the start of what we call the union stockyards. that is the beginning of this industry here. we have eight omaha city leaders who purchase just shy of 2,000 acres of land and devote it -- 250 of those acres to livestock pens and the livestock exchange building and things like that. so they're developing this strirks starting -- starting it off in 1884. omaha had an existing railroad

here with owen pacific and the union station, and so we definitely wanted to have, just use what we had to have the stack yards start here and utilize that trance continental where -- railroad going through to quickly move cattle and animals to slaughter houses like in chicago, for example. but eventually having our own here proved very profitable for the city. ,600 people but by the time the city was 29 years old it had 30,000 people. this is only four miles south of omaha. the cities were starting to grow together and then the city of omaha annexed the south omaha and the stockyards. it was called the magic city and also porkopolis as it grew

because of the industries here. by the 1950's 9 stockyards employed 300 to 400 people and would run crews 24/7 to keep up with demand. we were the largest stockyard in the world, larger than chicago. there were all kinds of industry associated with the stockyards that just literally seemed to bloom overnight. thuts magic city. we had a lot of immigrant groups coming in to work the stockyards -- german, irish, czechs, poles. it was a good living and you had everything you needed much the packing houses, the big four as we called thep, made sure there were amenities in south ome open. pretty much if you lived in south omaha you worked for the packing yards or stockyards in some capacity. each different type of animal, hogs, cattle, sheep, our

pabbing houses were some of the only ones in the world bit 1950's that would still process all three types of meat. by the 1960's pretty much the packing houses had been built in the 18890's and were becoming out of date. so really the whole industry starts taking a different turn and omaha stops being that center. the stockyards are unely -- unfortunately not there. the only piece present is the livestock exchange building, and that was pretty much a mini city when it was conceived. it had everything in it from barber shops to hotel shops, hotel rooms, administrative affses, ballrooms. it was a kind of one-stop shop for south omaha and pretty much anything you needed to do with the stockyard exchange would be there. it's now apartments and pedro martinez happen t