1905 Beaux-Arts Carnegie Library Reborn as a Railroad Archive
200 Pearl Street, Council Bluffs, IA 51503
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Admission is free. The museum is supported by Union Pacific Railroad and operated as a public history attraction.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved sidewalks; multi-story museum with elevator
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1905 · Andrew Carnegie Library Bequest · Beaux-Arts Architecture · Union Pacific Railroad Museum · Transcontinental Railroad Eastern Terminus
Council Bluffs's first free public library opened to the public on August 15, 1905, in a new Beaux-Arts building at 200 Pearl Street funded by a bequest from steel magnate and library benefactor Andrew Carnegie. The two-story limestone structure served as the city's main library through most of the 20th century. After Council Bluffs built a new public library at a different location, the Carnegie building was left vacant and required significant repair.
Union Pacific Railroad had operated a small in-house museum in a room adjacent to the office of President Carl Gray in Omaha, Nebraska, beginning in 1921. By the early 2000s the railroad and the City of Council Bluffs, together with a group of local preservation advocates, organized the rehabilitation of the Carnegie building into the Union Pacific Railroad Museum. The museum opened on May 10, 2003.
The collection focuses on the construction and operation of the first Transcontinental Railroad, completed at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869, and on Union Pacific's subsequent 150 years of operations. The photographic collection includes the largest archive of Transcontinental Railroad construction images in the world. Council Bluffs is historically significant in U.S. railroad history as the eastern terminus designated by President Abraham Lincoln for the Union Pacific portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Admission to the museum is free.
Sources
Local accounts from Council Bluffs library staff during the building's library tenure describe the basement of the Carnegie structure as the most active part of the building. Reports collected by local paranormal writers describe books found displaced from their shelves overnight, small personal items briefly vanishing and reappearing in different rooms, and shadowed figures noticed at the periphery of the lower-level stacks.
The lore is consistent with the late-Victorian and Edwardian-era American Carnegie library pattern: deep masonry basements with low light, unusual acoustic resonance from the stone walls, and stack rooms staffed by a small number of people who spent long hours alone among the collection. The basement phenomena, by most local accounts, diminished after the 2002-2003 conversion to a railroad museum changed the lighting, ventilation, and traffic patterns of the lower level.
The Union Pacific Railroad Museum does not market the building as a paranormal attraction. The legend persists primarily through Iowa folklore collections and ghost-tour itineraries in the Omaha-Council Bluffs metro area.
Walk through the largest collection of Transcontinental Railroad construction photographs in the world, plus 150 years of artifacts, documents, and rolling-stock equipment, all housed inside the restored 1905 Beaux-Arts Carnegie library building.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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