ATSF Plainview, TX Depot

Plainview, TX

This well preserved brick county seat depot dating from 1910 replaced a frame structure built just three years earlier. The Plainview depot included an open-air waiting room with two arches along its length, similar to the depot at Cherryvale, KS but in constrast to the single-arch open waiting rooms on the 1910-built depots at Kingman, KS and Waynoka, OK. These 1984 Doyle Davis photos show several interesting features that have since been removed, including the colorlight train order signal and high speed fork (above), and what appears to be a neon Santa Fe sign on the street side of the depot (below).


Six years later, train orders are a memory, the agency is closed, and the depot is used only by crews and maintenance of way forces. At one time, four depots stood in Plainview within a block of each other. Santa Fe's freight house, rebuilt from the original 1907 passenger depot, stood a block or so east of the brick station. The Fort Worth & Denver City (Burlington) had their passenger and freight depots a block south of the respective Santa Fe buildings. By the early 1990's, the BN "depot" was merely a portable building and the Santa Fe freight house was gone. The Santa Fe passenger and FW&D freight depots remain.