CSX Transportation officials could close the train depot in downtown Hamilton as part of a company-wide plan to close a number of these buildings across the nation.

Hamilton officials are taking a proactive approach in hopes of keeping the structure at 432 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. from becoming a vacant eyesore in the middle of downtown’s revitalization.

Jody Gunderson, Hamilton’s economic development director, said city leaders have met with CSX Transportation a couple of times during the past few months.

“The city prompted the meeting after it heard that it may close,” Gunderson said. “The employees there wanted the city to be proactive.”

The depot is the base office for about 20 CSX workers who do rail maintenance and signal repair on the railroad. CSX has recently surveyed a property to build a new maintenance office just north of the city, according to Dan Finfrock, of Fairfield, a local railroad historian.

While the city faces various budget constraints, it has developed public/private partnerships to revitalize downtown. The Historic Mercantile Lofts, the Butler Tech Fine Arts Academy that found a new use for the former JournalNews building, the Robinson-Schwenn Building and the Artspace project are all examples of downtown projects where the city worked with private developers.

The city has also created Community Reinvestment Areas for business and residential use to get people to move into to the city and reinvest into their properties.

City officials and CSX met was last month in Hamilton and at that time, CSX told the city they had not made any decision on the depot’s future.

“They said they had multiple options, but this (the Hamilton train depot) was not in their capital plan,” Gunderson said. “They said they would keep the city advised on their plans.”

A CSX representative confirmed late Wednesday that no decision has been made about the depot’s future in Hamilton.

The depot holds a great amount of historical significance in the city.

The train depot has been around since the mid-1800s — it may the oldest building in Hamilton that’s still in use, local historians said — and was the place where Hamiltonians would catch a train to bigger cities.

“There’s a lot of history there,” Finfrock said. “That’s where Hamilton’s industrialists who built the city got on and off the train at. It was the main hub of Hamilton during it’s building era and probably the oldest public building in the city.”

There’s also a good possibility that President Abraham Lincoln may have spoken at the train depot when his train stopped in town in the early 1860s, he said

The train depot is the last of the old Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad that opened 1851 with a number of stops in Butler County, Finfrock said.

Until about four years ago people could catch an AMTRAK train at the depot, Finfrock said.

A committee in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s was trying to save the depot.

“CSX was a willing partner to turn it over,” Finfrock said. “But things weren’t progressing in the 1990s and the committee gave up after working on the project for about 10 years. It seemed that the city administration at the time was not interested and nothing got done.”

He said people were waiting to see if there might be any changes in Hamilton politics to possibly try again.

“With CSX and the possible demise of the train depot, I thought this might be a good time to try and save it,” Finfrock said.