The Tamaqua Train Station will be getting a new roof sometime in 2024.

“We are going to replace it before we need to replace it,” said Micah Gursky, executive director of the Tamaqua Area Community Partnership, the nonprofit organization that owns the historic station.

When a portion of the roof was replaced a few years ago, he said, contractors recommended that an overall replacement be considered “sooner rather than later.”

“We just want to make sure that we’re maintaining that beautiful, community-owned resource, and we want to get to that roof before we need to,” Gursky said.

The train station was built in 1874 and will turn 150 years old in 2024.

“This year (2023) it was featured on a postage stamp, and it was the location for our first Railfest,” Gursky said. “So the station over the past 20 years since it was restored is really becoming more and more important every year.”

It’s also the site where folks from all over the area board train excursions.

In November, Tamaqua Borough Council approved a certificate of appropriateness that was recommended by the borough’s Historical Architectural Review Commission for the roof replacement.

“There’s a whole generation of people over the last 20 years who have grown up in this community and only known that station as a beautiful showpiece,” Gursky said. “It’s something to be proud of. But we don’t want to forget that it fell into disrepair. We don’t want that to ever happen again so we want to make these improvements.”

Donations to help offset the cost of the roof can be sent to the station at 18 N. Railroad St., Tamaqua, PA, 18252.

The station is on the National Register of Historic Places.