One of the first stations for California’s new high-speed rail line is actually 152 years old

The Fresno depot, built in 1872, will be the entry point for a more modern station.

Renderings have just been released showing the first four stations of California’s long-planned high-speed rail system that will connect San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities across the state. Designed by the British architecture giant Foster and Partners with engineering from Arup, the stations are smooth and modernist portals that canopy over the rail lines like bronze tunnels. Rising dozens of feet high and stretching for hundreds more along the landscape, the station designs assert a futuristic face for a transit system many hope will usher revolutionary change in the nation’s most populous state.