The general waiting room has a clear width of 120 feet, is 219 feet long, exclusive of the colonnades, and is covered by a Roman barrel-vaulted ceiling, its highest point, exclusive of coffers, being 96 feet above the floor level. The decorations are sunken panels patterned after the baths of Diocletian. It is lighted by a semicircular window 72¹⁄₂ feet in diameter at the east end, by three semicircular windows in the south side and five on the north side, each 27¹⁄₂ feet in diameter, and by the glass roof over the ticket lobby at the west end. Imperial Rome at her greatest did not possess a hall of such proportions. The Union Station is built of Vermont white granite. In the construction of this massive building Mr. Burnham set a standard for civic improvement for the construction of railroad terminals in this country. The complete architectural treatment of the front elevation of the station includes six stone statues and four eagles, the former over the central pavilion, and the latter over the carriage entrances at the east and west ends. This statuary is placed in front of the great friezes over the main entrance arches and over the carriage archways and, with the inscriptions in the panels between, have been made a special architectural feature. Before the adoption of the scheme a number of suggestions for the subjects of the statues and inscriptions were secured, ranging from the explorers and discoverers of this country to the various inventors who have had most to do with the development of transportation. The general architectural treatment of the building, however, was such as to preclude the usual portrait statues. To make them take their place as part of the architecture required that they be limited to allegorical draped figures, forming simple, massive silhouettes against the vast frieze. In the development of the complete scheme, embracing the subjects for the statuary, with appropriate inscriptions in the intervening panels, the late Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard University, was consulted. The result is an appropriate and adequate treatment of the decorative frieze over the doorway of the vestibule to the Capital of the Nation.