I hope they leave some space for new and expanded platforms at Salt Lake Central Station. I suppose I could narrow-up my fantasy plans some, but it's still going to get pretty tight around the northwest corner of the old locomotive shop building:
(In my figure Tan is platforms, Pink lines are new tracks for the Park City-Tooele line, Red lines are relocated FrontRunner and Trax tracks to make their platforms wider, and Purple are elevated walkways to connect all the platforms together. White, Gray, and Black are new structures - office buildings, hotel and retail space, and a new signature headhouse for the station.)
I like the idea of large enclosed stations very much... but I also have the feeling that they're a bit of a skeuomorph. Back when trains were pulled by steam engines that exhausted large quantities of coal smoke and super-hot steam, the only way to cover a platform area was to have large voluminous spaces above the trains so that there was a space for these gases to fill beside inside the passengers' lungs.
Stations built today can be much more efficient. Check out this picture of a tram in Dubai:
The station platform is completely climate-controlled, because it is enclosed by glass walls on all sides. When the train pulls up to the platform, '
platform screen doors' open to let passengers in and out of the train.
In my opinion, this is a better option than building a large roof over multiple platforms, because there is no way to efficiently cool or heat a platform that is only protected by a roof, and there is no good way to put doors across the railroad tracks themselves. My ideal version of Salt Lake Central Station would have the platforms arranged as pictured above, and each of them (except the Amtrak platform) would be enclosed and feature Platform Screen Doors. The triangular plaza between Trax and FrontRunner could possibly be fitted with a retractable roof like the City Creek Mall. The idea is that more than a roof, complete climate control is desirable and probably necessary if we want the transit experience to be desirable to the general public beyond us die-hard users.
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