42|Terminal Station — A 1916 Rail Hall Playing an Airport

Alfred T. Fellheimer designed Grand Central Terminal before he designed this one. You can see it in the proportions the moment you step inside: a vaulted hall built in 1916 for a city that expected a hundred trains a day, with more room above your head than any bus passenger will ever need.

For 42, the crew turned that grandeur into a 1940s airport. Robinson's baseball life ran on aeroplanes and Pullman cars, and the production needed a terminal that looked like the era without looking like a set. They dressed a room inside the station, brought in period furniture and signage, and shot it deep into the night — local extras remember being called at one in the morning. Some of those faces never made the final cut. That is the ordinary arithmetic of a location shoot.

Downtown Macon supplied everything around it. Storefronts on Cherry and Second were repainted, early-model cars were parked along the kerbs, and the block outside the station stayed dressed for roughly two weeks.

Terminal Station is not a museum piece behind glass. Since 2014 it has been the Macon Transit Authority's bus hub, with Greyhound running out of it too, which means the doors are open and the benches are full of people actually going somewhere. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Go in the middle of a weekday, sit on a bench in the main hall, and look up. The building is doing in 2026 what it did in 1916 and what it pretended to do in 1946 — moving people out of Macon and toward somewhere that might treat them better.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.