Union Depot

Very charming place to visit. In the winter it’s pretty dead, none of the gift shops were open, but we were left alone.
The place is kept up pretty well. I would recommend this place especially in the winter when there’s not a lot of other places open.

Fun place to visit — everyone should go at least once.

As a rail museum, I’d give Union Depot high marks. In fact, I was more impressed with this museum than with the National Railroad Museum that we had visited in Green Bay about a week earlier, and even more so than our own state railroad museum in Sacramento.
The displays were well-​organized and informative. There are locomotives, cabooses and other rolling stock of the past on display both indoors and out; even a rotary snowplow and one of the huge Milwaukee Road electric locomotives.
There is a nice model railroad layout and a small gift shop as well.
Definitely we’d return if we ever go back to Duluth.

Way back when, my fiancé and I had decided to have our wedding reception here. The fee was reasonable. The architecture of this building is amazing. And as a museum, it’s absolutely worth four stars in my book for having an adequate level of amusement and informative information.
But that changed and after this point, I have absolutely nothing nice to say about the complete and utter dismay and disorganization that we have encountered with this group.
I should have known something was up shortly after making the decision to hold the reception there when I was talking to some other wedding vendors in Duluth and had multiple people say, «ohh, The Depot? Welll… it’s beautiful, but they’re…well, sometimes they are difficult to work with in some ways.»
«Such as?» I ask, feeling the beginnings of that dull panic I get whenever somebody warns me against something I’ve already decided.
«Oh, I’m sure you won’t have any problems. I don’t want to gossip. You know how things are up here.»
What? Ok, whatever.
Originally, we’d set our wedding date for the fall of 2007. We received a contract from The Depot with the following instructions: «you sign this and mail it back to us. Then we will sign it and mail you a copy.» They never did. But we weren’t overly stressed out about it because we still had plenty of time and we had received a phone call confirming the fact that they’d received our contract and that the date was being reserved for us.
But then we ended up moving from Chicago to Minnesota and decided that changing jobs and doing an out-​of-​state move was stress enough for one relationship and decided to postpone the wedding for the summer of 2008. So we called The Depot and asked if we could change the date. They were very agreeable and sent us a new contract which we also signed and returned along with a copy of the first payment.
I started getting concerned when a number of months had passed and…
–they still had not returned a copy of the contract
–they still had not cashed the check
–I found out that the date we’d selected had been chosen for Grandma’s Marathon (a HUGE deal).
–The dull panic started increasing…
Being annoyed about the fact that we still hadn’t received a copy of the contract and the lack of communication, we called in December 2007 to cancel. We explained the fact that Grandma’s Marathon would make it impossible for our guests to find lodging was the main reason we were cancelling. And we’d also decided it would be easier to plan a wedding for the place we were living and wanted to have it in the Cities. They apologized and said they would return the check.
And then I closed the account that the check had been written on (which was an old checking account for a bank in Chicago that doesn’t have branches in Minnesota), forgot about the whole thing and moved on with making plans for the wedding in the Twin Cities scheduled for July 2008.
Several more months passed. And one day I received a letter in the mail from a collection agency. I FLIPPIN’ PANICKED!!! I messed up my credit horribly when I was in my early 20’s and have spent the past 5 years working diligently to correct the damage my younger self had done. I’d like to buy a house in the next year or so and I also work for a financial company and carry a number of licenses that could be revoked for irresponsible financial decisions (I know somebody who got fired and banned from ever working in the industry again after writing some bad checks). So yeah, this WAS serious!
Not wanting to mess around. I paid the amount due (luckily it wasn’t much) just to keep that friggin’ collection as far away from my credit as humanly possible.
Mere days after the collection was paid, we received a voice mail from someone at The Depot. They «thanked» us for the payment and then gave instructions to make the next payment and that they were still holding the date for us. HOLD UP!!! NEXT PAYMENT WHAT??? WE CANCELLED THIS EVENT MONTHS AND MONTHS AND MONTHS AGO YOU FREAKS!!!
The part that infuriates me THE MOST about this whole thing is the fact that they never attempted to contact us and immediately handed the «bad» check (that they had said they would return to us) over to a collection agency. And yet days after it was paid, they mysteriously were able to contact us. Why in fucks sake would you hand someone immediately over to a collection agency without first making the effort to contact them yourselves to figure out what was going on? Especially since you weren’t entitled to that check in the first place!!! NOT COOL.