The station occupied two full city blocks at the eastern end of 5th Avenue North. Its exterior was dressed in light-brown brick, and twin towers capped the north and south wings. But the soul of the building was inside: a central waiting room beneath a dome 64 feet in diameter, its surface covered in Guastavino terra-cotta tilework, pierced by a skylight of ornamental glass that cast shifting patterns across the floor. The lower walls were finished in gray Tennessee marble. The space hushed travelers at first sight. Historian Marvin Clemons would later call it a 'Great Temple of Travel,' and the name stuck. At its peak the station handled 52 trains daily, with named runs like the Silver Comet from New York, the City of Miami from Chicago, the Birmingham Special, and the Southerner to New Orleans threading through Alabama's industrial heart.

During World War II, the Terminal Station processed roughly 3,000 passengers each day. Soldiers shipping out, families reuniting, the full emotional weight of a nation at war passed through those marble-walled halls. A cast-iron 'Magic City' sign, erected in 1926 as a gift from local booster E.M. Elliott, hung over the tracks - 'Welcome to Birmingham the Magic City.' For decades, that sign was the first thing visitors saw. It came down in 1952, scrapped because of deterioration. The station's own deterioration would follow. Automobiles and airlines steadily drained riders. By 1960, only 26 trains per day stopped at the terminal. By the beginning of 1969, just seven remained.

The station had been built with separate waiting areas for Black and white passengers, as required by the Jim Crow provisions of Alabama's 1901 constitution. In 1957, civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth and his wife Ruby walked into the white waiting room and sat down. Crowds of belligerent whites gathered. Shuttlesworth would not move. The act of defiance was part of a broader legal challenge: the Interstate Commerce Commission had ruled against segregation in interstate transportation, but Alabama enforced its own distinctions between interstate and intrastate travelers. The legal fight wound through the courts until 1961, when a court order finally required the station's full integration. Those confrontations at the Terminal Station were among the many episodes that made Birmingham a crucible of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Birmingham Terminal Company filed a petition to demolish the station in June 1969. Approval came in eighteen days. Demolition crews arrived on September 22, 1969, and by year's end the building was gone. The last train had departed on December 21. Mayor George Seibels, who had first arrived in Birmingham through the Terminal in 1938, later admitted that preservation efforts lacked coordination. The site was considered for a Social Security Administration building but was ultimately paved over for the Red Mountain Expressway. Where travelers once gazed up at a Byzantine dome, cars now stream through a highway interchange. The loss of the Terminal Station became a rallying image for Birmingham preservationists, sparking efforts to save other threatened landmarks across the city. The station is gone, but its absence shaped how Birmingham thinks about what it tears down.