“It’s an icon of Kirkwood and an icon of the St. Louis area and we would like to see it go on for many generations more,” Kirkwood City Engineer Chris Krueger said Wednesday in an interview.

The City Council on Thursday is expected to approve a nearly $5.2 million contract with Raineri Construction, capping years of planning for the project, which is funded through federal and state grants and private donations.

An icon of downtown Kirkwood that’s featured in the city logo, the distinctive train depot built in 1893 is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It once served passengers on as many as 14 trains a day running between downtown St. Louis and Kirkwood, which was founded as a commuter suburb along the Union Pacific Railroad. The city’s namesake, James Pugh Kirkwood, was an engineer and surveyor for the railroad.

The city purchased the station from Union Pacific in 2003 for nearly $1 million with hopes of keeping it operating, and rallied dozens of volunteers to work at the station when Amtrak cut staffing because of tight budgets. Today, the station is entirely volunteer run, serving train passengers daily and welcoming historical preservation and train enthusiasts, as well as private groups that rent the space for events.

The station last underwent a major renovation in 1941, when the layout was updated to accommodate cars rather than horses and stagecoaches. The next project calls for a new roof, new parking lot, new storage building, new break room, new and larger bathrooms, a new HVAC system, an extension of the existing canopy to Kirkwood Road and restoration of the historic light fixtures and flooring, among other improvements.

The project was awarded about $1.7 million in federal funding from the Transportation Alternatives Program and $2.5 million in Missouri funding from the state’s allotment of American Rescue Plan Act funds. The Kirkwood Train Station Foundation, a preservation nonprofit formed in 2013, also raised about $900,000 in donations for the effort, Krueger said.

Construction is scheduled to begin in mid-November, after the Missouri Department of Transportation gives final approval of the city’s contract with Ranieri, Krueger said. The city will install a temporary train depot across Kirkwood Road to serve passengers while the station is being renovated, he said.

Raineri Construction submitted the lowest cost of two bids for the project, which was designed by Mackey Mitchell Architects.