Though Burnham is regarded more as a planner and organizer rather than a designer of details, which were left to draftsmen like Peter Joseph Weber, the most extraordinary feature of the monumental train station is its rotunda with corner pavilions.

By the late 1970s the Penn Central Corporation was accepting bids for the complex and it was purchased by the US General Services Administration.

The concourse, which is no longer open to the public, was transformed into a lobby for commercial spaces on the ground floor and the paint cleaned off the great central skylight.

The rotunda is now closed to vehicular traffic; modern cars and trucks are too heavy for the brick road surface and risk caving in the roof to the parking garage below it.

Until 2005, Pittsburgh was also served by the Three Rivers (a replacement service for the Broadway Limited), an extended version of the Pennsylvanian that terminated in Chicago.

Its cancellation marked the first time in Pittsburgh's railway history that the city was served by just two daily passenger trains.

In September 1978, The New Yorker art critic Brendan Gill proclaimed that Pittsburgh's Penn Station is "one of the great pieces of Beaux-Arts architecture in America...[one of the] symbols of the nation.

It opened in 1988 with regular shuttle service to Steel Plaza station, as well as two afternoon rush-hour trains on the 42S (now the Red Line).

Since 2007, the station has seen occasional use, mostly for charters or special events, such as part of the agency's detoured transportation routes following Super Bowl XLV on February 6, 2011, as part of the "Railvolution" transit convention in October 2018,[15][16] and during concrete repair work in the downtown tunnels between Steel Plaza and Gateway Station in March 2023.