Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

The locals casino that out-booked the Strip at country music. Boulder Station opened on 23 August 1994 on Boulder Highway in Sunrise Manor, the first new hotel-casino on the east side of Las Vegas since 1979 and the second property in the Station Casinos empire that Frank Fertitta Jr. built for residents rather than tourists. The 103-million-dollar, Victorian-styled resort carried the family's railroad theme - stained-glass murals of nineteenth-century trains over the table games - around 300 hotel rooms, a 75,000-square-foot casino with thousands of slots, a poker room, a race and sports book, five restaurants including the acclaimed Broiler steakhouse, and, from a 1995 expansion, an 11-screen cinema, video arcade and child-care centre that made it the east side's family entertainment anchor. The property's national reputation, though, was earned by the Railhead, its house concert venue. Opened with the resort and expanded in 2000 from 450 seats to roughly 900 after a 2.5-million-dollar buildout, the room became one of the first serious dedicated showrooms beyond the tourist corridor - and an improbable incubator: Toby Keith played it ten times, Little Big Town appeared as a free lounge act, and Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, Zac Brown Band and the Dixie Chicks all crossed the stage on their way up. The Academy of Country Music named Boulder Station its Casino of the Year three times - 1999, 2001 and 2003, the only property so honoured more than once - while the long-running Boulder Blues series gave names like Joe Bonamassa their early Las Vegas rooms, and weekly Latin nights later broadened the booking again. A 50-million-dollar renovation in 2008 and a hotel refresh in 2011 kept the property competitive on the Boulder Strip, where it remains what it was designed to be: the neighbourhood's one-stop night out - dinner, a movie, a hand of cards and a headliner - fifteen minutes and a world away from the Strip.