 In the following year, seeing the nearby townsite of Cleveland as a threat to his plans for Columbus, he bought the only building on the site, a hotel, and moved it to Columbus.He renamed the building the Credit Foncier Hotel, after his land company, Credit Foncier of America; 
in it, he set aside a room permanently reserved for the President of the United States.Train believed that the capital of the United States should be in the geographic center of the nation, 
and promoted Columbus as "...the new center of the Union and quite probably the future capital of the U.S.A."

Columbus grew and prospered during the 1870s, as a result of both expanding agriculture in Platte County and traffic on the railroad.