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Originally Posted: Dec 16, 2010 One week ago heavy equipment operators moved the historic East Stroudsburg train station from its foundation on Crystal Street. It now stands, still fire-damaged but saved from the wrecker’s ball, across the railroad tracks. One week ago heavy equipment operators moved the historic East Stroudsburg train station from its foundation on Crystal Street. It now stands, still fire-damaged but saved from the wrecker’s ball, across the railroad tracks. The move, though, is just the beginning of the work that station champions have cut out for themselves. The Eastburg Community Alliance is spearheading the restoration effort, but it will be up to us, the community, to commit the time and money needed to repair the structure and make it into a working museum and destination point. The idea is to celebrate railroad history and its role in the development of East Stroudsburg. The defunct station was converted into a bar-restaurant, the Dansbury Depot, in the 1980s. It changed hands, then partially burned 13 months ago. Then a local developer, Troy Nauman, worked out plans with East Stroudsburg borough to demolish the station and build something bigger. Nauman reluctantly agreed to let rail enthusiasts move the station to make way for the new, three-story structure he’s building there. The future is less clear for the old station. ECA has $300,000 combined from a local bank and Monroe County Commissioners in hand and is approved for a $50,000 Community and Regional Development Program grant for inside improvements. Much, much more is needed to achieve the plan to reopen the station within a year. Other Pocono-area communities have rallied around their own former train stations, but the process is often costly and long-term. A single landmark-conscious individual, Karl Weiler, took over the dilapidated Cresco rail station there in the 1990s and refurbished it. It’s now an attractive small museum. Years ago the Lackawanna Chapter of the Railroad and Historic Locomotives Society got the badly deteriorated, 1904 Delaware Water Gap station on the National Register of Historic Places and put it under tarp, and the DWG Station Preservation Partnership got a tourism grant to put it under new roof. But the station, on what’s now an out-of-the-way street, will take many more years to complete. East Stroudsburg’s 1864 depot was a hub of passenger and freight traffic. ECA stresses those trains’ role in borough history as a key part of the station’s promotion. The building stands in a highly visible site. The first task is to build a new foundation and lock the structure in place. The entire project could cost upward of $1 million. We commend the enthusiastic local residents who saved this historic building from destruction. We challenge them, and others who value the lessons we learn from our local history, to work hard on re-creating the building and making it into something useful again.