For more than 100 years, a brick train depot has stood along Moline’s River Drive, first serving railroad passengers and then office employees of Frank Foundries and the Quad-Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Now, though, the depot stands in the way of a proposed new Interstate 74 bridge and is slated for demolition.

On Tuesday, the nonprofit preservation group Landmarks Illinois announced that it has placed the depot — the only one remaining in Moline — on its annual list of the “Ten Most Endangered Historic Places” in the state. 

The list is designed to focus attention on sites throughout Illinois that are threatened by deterioration, a lack of maintenance, insufficient funds or inappropriate development, and to drum up support to save the sites.

Among those attending a news conference in Springfield was Barbara Sandberg, the chairman of the Moline Historic Preservation Commission, which has been monitoring plans for the bridge for the past three years and voicing concern for the Moline-owned depot that was declared a city landmark in 1994.

Sandberg has long hoped the depot could be moved, and she believed at one time that an understanding had been reached with Illinois Department of Transportation, or DOT, officials to do just that by folding the expense — roughly estimated at $500,000 — into the overall $800 million cost of the bridge project.

Members of the city staff and the preservation commission had even picked a site: a vacant lot southeast of the depot’s present location and next to the railroad tracks. That would have been a move of about two blocks, and it had been OK’d by the City Council, she said.

But the final environmental impact statement for the bridge that was issued in February by the Iowa and Illinois departments of transportation calls for the circa-1900 depot to be demolished because it is in the way of a planned exit ramp.

The statement said that although relocation was considered, “no willing manager for the site was identified, therefore this option was not carried forward for future consideration,” according to Doug Rick, the Iowa DOT project manager for the bridge.

That came as news to Moline City Administrator Lew Steinbrecher, who said Tuesday that before the statement was issued, he had told the DOT that the city both owned and maintained the building and that he suspected it would continue to do so.

Rebecca Marruffo, a project engineer for the Illinois DOT, reiterated Tuesday that the department could not find a willing manager, a public entity, that would agree to maintain and occupy the building in perpetuity. Marruffo said she could not say whether Sandberg’s earlier understanding that the DOT would bear the cost of moving the building “was correct or not.”

Marruffo said she would be willing to discuss the issue with the city, but, regardless, the bottom line is the cost. The DOT might contribute an amount that otherwise would go toward demolition, but it would not be inclined to bear the entire expense, she said.

And the city, which is facing a budget shortfall, is not likely to approve such an expenditure, either, Steinbrecher said.