LEXINGTON - The prospect was hard for the curious to resist: the 121-year-old, 375-ton, brick Lexington train station on wheels and rolling down McLaughlin Street.

But there it was Wednesday morning, trussed up in steel beams and wrapped in steel bands. And it was rolling, if excruciatingly slowly, to a destination 400 feet away to make room for a Washington and Lee University arts and music center. W&L hauled in a set of bleachers and handed out free bottled water and cookies to spectators.

Gawkers filled the bleachers and lined a fence put up to keep them at a safe distance. Preschool teachers brought the kids down to check it out. Retirees brought folding chairs. Behind them, a W&L art class documented the scene with pastels and watercolors.

And why not? This was real drama. This old building is 144 feet long and brittle as a day-old baguette. What if it crumbled into a dusty heap?

"That's always a gnawing fear," said retired psychologist Beverly Tucker, 66, of Lexington. But it's not why she came. "I didn't have anything better to do than watch a train station go down the road," she said. "I'm seeing people I haven't seen since they put the steeple back on the Presbyterian church."

That was the last time Lexingtonians turned out for a spectacle of this sort. In March 2002, a new steeple was placed atop Lexington Presbyterian Church, which burned in 2000.

But onlookers that day got a payoff. However long they waited, they knew that eventually the steeple would be hoisted atop the church.

No such climax was promised Wednesday.

The station moved along a bed of 4-by-6-inch timbers in short, barely noticeable spurts. It was towed by a pair of specially designed winches.

The crowd would relax into conversation but would snap to attention with the cracking of lumber under the weight of the station when it was on the move again. After 2 or 3 feet of progress, the tow cables would go slack, and people would return to their conversations.

Tucker drives by the station at McLaughlin and Glasgow streets daily and watched the progress as workers first put steel beams through and along the length of the building, and then slowly jacked it up. Finally, they installed 14 hydraulic dollies.

The station had to be kept on an even plane throughout its trip to its new site in a parking lot across McLaughlin Street. The dollies are self-adjusting, said Erik Eshleman, the general contractor overseeing the project. Workers from Blake Moving of North Carolina made constant adjustments as the building crept forward.

And if it did crumble in transit? "We're fully insured," said Joe Grasso, W&L vice president for administration.

The station hadn't been used since 1969, when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad gave it to W&L. It was remarkably well-preserved inside, said W&L architect Tom Contos, including the separate white and "colored" entrances and waiting rooms.

W&L could have demolished the building to make way for the 60,000-square-foot arts and music center. But school officials quickly learned that city officials and area historic preservationists wouldn't tolerate it.

So the school decided to spend the half million dollars to move the building. Officials aren't sure what it will be used for, Grasso said.

By noon, the building had moved about 40 feet and appeared to be at a stall.

Only a few dozen spectators remained to take free bottled water and cookies from Sharon Edwards.

Edwards was watching the landscape of her youth change before her eyes. She grew up across the street from the station and remembers when it was converted to a bus depot in the early 1960s. That was the day her father made the family start locking their doors. Trains were a genteel, daytime business, she explained. Buses arrived all night.

As assistant to the W&L architect, she's been watching the station move on paper for weeks. "I'll just be glad when they finally yank it across the street."

"It certainly is snaillike," remarked Clara Belle Weatherman, who walked a few blocks from her home with her husband, Bob Barnard, to check out the scene.

Within a few minutes, Weatherman had seen enough.

"Are you ready to go, Bob?" she asked.

"No, I'm going to wait for a lurch," Barnard said. "It's bound to do something."

It never did, at least not while Barnard waited. It turned out that the workers had to replace a faulty hydraulic gauge, which halted the move temporarily.

Eshleman, the contractor, expected the station to be across McLaughlin Street by 3 p.m., when their permit to close the road expired. At 5 p.m., it still was sitting in the road. But by 6:30, it was across and, but for a few minor cracks, remained in one piece.