Livingston Depot Center

The Livingston Depot Center is a museum in the town's old Northern Pacific Railway station, a long Italianate building of red and yellow brick with terra-cotta trim beside the tracks on the edge of downtown. It was dedicated in the summer of 1902. It took about three years to build and cost $112,000, and was designed by Reed and Stem of St. Paul. It replaced a wooden station from 1882 that burned and a brick one from 1888 that proved too small.

Livingston mattered to the railway because it was the junction for the Northern Pacific's Yellowstone Park Branch, the line south to Gardiner. For decades, park visitors from the east changed trains here on their way to what the museum calls the original entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Rail travel to the park fell away around the Second World War. After the Northern Pacific became part of Burlington Northern in 1970, Amtrak's North Coast Hiawatha stopped here from June 1971 until the service ended in October 1979, and no passenger trains have called since. Burlington Northern gave the building to the city in 1985, and the Depot Center opened in the summer of 1987.

The permanent exhibits are Rails Across the Rockies, on the railways, Yellowstone and the people who built the lines, and Remarkable Migrations, on elk migration, adapted from an exhibit at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Each summer brings a featured exhibition; in 2026 it was Absarokas: Mountains Defined by Two Rivers, paintings, field sketches and prints by Paul Waldum. Photographs of the Northern Pacific's Livingston shop crews hang among the displays. Outside there is a courtyard, a small park and picnic tables.

The museum keeps a short season. In 2026 it was open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00, from 26 May to 4 September, and it is closed from mid-September until May. The Depot Center says only that admission is charged, and older listings give anything from a donation to $5, so expect a small fee. Allow 45 to 75 minutes. You can look at the building and the platform side at any time of year.

The depot is at 200 West Park Street, a short walk from Main Street. Freight trains still run on the line beside it, so stay off the tracks. The Yellowstone Gateway Museum, in Livingston's old schoolhouse on the north side of town, covers the wider history of the upper Yellowstone and makes a good second stop.