It’s back to the future as a technology, engineering and innovation hub is being created in the old Santa Fe Railway station southeast of downtown Colorado Springs.

The Catalyst Campus of Technology & Innovation is described by its creator, the O’Neil Group Co., as a place where educators, students, technology companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and more will meet to collaborate on new ideas and forge partnerships to pursue technology breakthroughs that will lead to new companies and jobs.

The goal is to bring together aerospace, defense, information, satellite, cybersecurity and other advanced technology groups and serve as an incubator for innovation.

Ingrid Richter, O’Neil’s project leader, said it’s appropriate that it’s happening in the historic rail station, which is part of a three-building complex on 8.5 acres that the company bought in October for $4 million.

“In 1917, when this station opened, it was a great public gathering space and a hub of technology,” Richter said Thursday during a tour of the old station. “When everything is done, we intend in 2017 to celebrate a century of innovation here.”

It certainly was a community gathering place.

Before it was abandoned in 1971, it hosted thousands of passengers. Railroad historian Mel McFarland likes to tell audiences that more people – well over 100,000 – visited the city by rail in 1908 than used our airport in 2008.

Newspaper stories from 1917 boasted that the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway station represented the newest in architecture and design to accommodate the latest in transportation technology: the railroad.

It was a showplace with its spacious waiting room for 400 people, 28-foot ceilings, marble ticket counters, an outdoor covered pavilion and subways that let passengers walk safely under the tracks to reach the station.

And it included one of the railroad’s famed Harvey House restaurants – one with a large, oval lunch counter under a tall, arched ceiling with ornate tiled walls and a second formal dining room with beautiful walnut paneling.

The Harvey rooms represented innovation themselves, said Matt Mayberry, director of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.

“They were America’s first chain restaurants,” he said.

The railroad spent $325,000, or about $6 million in 2015 dollars, building the station using custom materials such as glazed red brick and tile from Coffeyville, Kan.

The O’Neil Group is spending $2 million to resurrect the building, which saw its last passenger train pass by on April 30, 1971. It was abandoned for years and sustained significant damage from a fire set by transients in 1975 before it was purchased and converted to an office complex in 1979.

The job of trying to find matching limestone, brick, tile and windows is being done by iiCON Construction Group.

Don Johnson, iiCON’s vice president, called it exciting and a challenge to work on the building, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

All involved look forward to completion of its first phase in September.

For O’Neil Group, it will be the start of its ambitious Catalyst project.

For Mayberry, it means protection of a key historic asset.

“This station is important because it is one of the few artifacts that exists from a very dynamic railroading history in Colorado Springs,” Mayberry said. “We had seven major rail lines that either came through or had their terminus in Colorado Springs. We were a real rail hub.”

And he noted a strong connection to Lt. Zebulon Pike, who discovered the namesake peak that dominates the Front Range.

“The Santa Fe followed Pike’s route west, down the Arkansas River and up Fountain Creek like Pike,” he said. “This building connects the Pike expedition and Western exploration to the modern era. It’s an important building.”

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