Monday, December 30, 2019

Canyon Diablo Atlantic & Pacific R.R. Station


 It's been a Great Day for piecing puzzle pieces together. We just added another piece to the jigsaw puzzle.

Well, the telegrapher at the tiny Canyon Diablo Station played an important eye-witness role in The Canyon Diablo Train Robbery. He "thought" about the idea of bagging himself some train robbers and collecting the fat reward but, as he sneaked around the building, one of the robber spotted him and winged a pistol bullet his way. That cured the telegrapher of any desire for reward money.

Naturally, we've always been curious as to what that building looked like and how the telegrapher was situated. Ralph Keithley's 1949 book includes a fuzzy photo on Page 107 that purports to show the original 1889 building.

Naturally, that caused us to dig into the "standard plans" so common with railroads. Was that building within the specifications of the design genre back then? Sure enough, we found an excellent article describing small station design and the Canyon Diablo building would have been well with the ubiquitous dormer bay structures. We would imagine the railroad had a series of plan sheets each scaled according to the size needed for any particular site.

Source of station plan information:

https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1981spring_bohi.pdf


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