Ten minutes by car from Michigan Central, the Detroit Institute of Arts provides a similar parable of the city’s rise and fall.

Housed in a grand building on Woodward Avenue (just across the road from an equally grand public library), the institute, like Michigan Central, evokes the high-point of Detroit’s success.

It has one of the most extensive art collections in the United States - one that would grace any capital city in the world. But then at one time Detroit was richer than any capital city.

Highlights of the institute include a variety of Dutch Masters including a Rembrandt. But one of its most famous treasures is inextricably linked to the auto industry.

The Detroit Industry Murals were painted between 1932 and 1933 by the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera (husband to the artist Frida Kahlo).

These massive artworks were commissioned directly for the institute, and they depict car manufacturing at the Ford company’s River Rouge plant.

There are two main frescoes on the north and south walls. One depicts the assembly of V8 engine blocks, while the other shows completed transmissions rolling along the production line.

Henry Ford’s son, Edsel Ford (Bill’s grandfather) contributed $20,000 to help defray the costs of the project. He is depicted at the right-hand side of one of the panels.

This detail from the mural shows Edsel Ford (second from right) This detail from the mural shows Edsel Ford (second from right)

Few cities in modern times have seen a downturn in fortune as spectacular as Detroit. Urban blight and decay are not unusual. But the scale and scope of what happened to Detroit are.

Well within living memory, the population of the city has collapsed. From more than 1.8 million in 1950, it stood at a little over 700,000 by 2010. And with the collapse in population came a collapse in local tax income. Increasingly the city could not pay for itself or the basic services that its remaining residents needed.

In 2013 the emergency manager appointed to run the city’s affairs was looking for assets that could be liquidated, and floated the idea of selling many of the institute’s artworks - “just like the furniture out of an office building”, according to local art historian Jeffrey Abt.

Eventually, what Abt describes as a “grand bargain” was reached and the 2,800 artworks earmarked for sale (worth a total of between $750-$800m) remain in the institute’s collection.

While a price can be put on artworks, it is almost impossible to calculate the human cost of Detroit’s decline.

It was in effect depopulated. Tens of thousands of buildings were empty and abandoned. Detroit became a city with a failing heart and a poor, mainly black, population. It was surrounded by more affluent, often white suburbs, with little interest in the goings-on at City Hall.

This was the city I first visited some 20 years ago.

Downtown was bleak and forbidding. It is the only city I have ever seen with abandoned sky-scrapers. At night it was dark and dangerous. In the neighbourhoods surrounding the city, many streets looked like war-zones.

Every third or fourth house was either burnt out or an empty lot. Those that remained were dilapidated and forlorn. Whole blocks of streets had been abandoned, and grass was growing through the foundations creating urban prairies.

There wasn’t much in the way of a tourist industry in Detroit. Visitors might come to see the home of the Motown music phenomenon. Otherwise, it seemed that there was only abandonment and ruins - grand names from the past such as the once swanky Book-Cadillac Hotel, or slowly collapsing factories like the Packard Plant and the Fisher Body Plant 21.

Lowell Boileau - artist, enthusiast for Detroit’s future and my guide on successive visits to the city - established a website to commemorate many of these great old buildings. He called it The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. Over them all - sentinel-like - stood the crumbling edifice of Michigan Central.

Boileau says he was delighted by Ford’s purchase of the station. Downtown Detroit had been undergoing a resurgence, but there was still “this huge ruin of a building, made worse by the fact that there were no other buildings around it - a symbol of the city’s failure”.

Lowell Boileau Lowell Boileau

Detroit was a city beyond crisis. Even today there are still vast numbers of empty lots and abandoned areas.

Lowell is sanguine about the city’s long-term prospects.

“I don't know what the future will hold,” he says. “But this is the pounding heart of Detroit, the historical centre of the city and you have to have a healthy heart before those limbs out there can prosper.

“Visitors now come to Detroit and suddenly they are not seeing abandoned buildings in the centre of the city. They're seeing a vibrant happening place, with these beautiful 1920s-era buildings glistening again.”

Boileau rhapsodises about his home city: “I know that Jerusalem has been destroyed many times. I know Rome has been sacked. I know cities go through cycles and Detroit has similarly gone through that.

“I know enough history,” he says, “to know that nothing is final. It will go through its ups and downs.”

When the final train left and the station closed its doors in 1988 the local newspaper - the Detroit Free Press - tried to put this sombre moment into a wider context. “The shutdown of Michigan Central,” it declared, “should be the occasion of serious reflection about what we once were; what we have lost; and what, given sufficient will, we could regain.”

So, might the trains ever come back to Michigan Central one day? Bill Ford does not rule this out completely.

“Right now, the tracks stop about a mile short of the station. But yes, I would love the trains to come back.

“Obviously,” he adds, “that's not within Ford's control but we're already starting to talk to some of the regional transportation people about just that. It's very early days, but I think it would be wonderful.”