The Railroad Station

The Thomas passenger and freight station was a point of arrival and departure for people, news, and goods. Before radio, television, and the internet, a railroad station was a center for community engagement and a bellwether for changing times. The station sat at the junction where the Davis branch split off from the main line from Elkins to Cumberland, and was midway between several of the largest industrial buildings and facilities in Thomas, making it convenient for visiting executives. The Thomas business district was actually further away, the mine tipples of the H.G. Davis Coal and Coke Company sat between the downtown and the new station. The building projected out over the river, and the iron pins in the stonework that held it remain. There are also parts of the brackets that held the passenger boarding platforms to the side of the bridge.

So this is the site of the Western Maryland Railway passenger and freight station. Originally the West Virginia & Pittsburg Railroad built a small wooden frame station building, roughly here, later on the Western Maryland Railway, as it was investing in heavier infrastructure, replaced that with a brick building. Now its function was in some ways typical with what you would find in any small town: a passenger train station in its day was a center of commercial and social activities, where the news came in, it was where all your most high-priority, perishable goods and things that have traveled on the fastest train came in, where your mail came in, and of course it was the place where people came and went from town. In this case, the sighting of the depot— it’s not quite right next to downtown Thomas, and there are a couple possible reasons for that, at least two; one is that the river bank, the river bottom in front of downtown Thomas was taken up by a railroad yard that was necessary to sort coal hopper cars into different trains for different destinations, and coming from different points of origin; the other is that this site here is located roughly in the middle between several important parts of the mining and industrial infrastructure here in Thomas, and the railroad may have chosen to prioritize that for company officials who had to [UNCLEAR]. But because it’s a tight location, the mine coming from Hendricks, goes off in one direction, the branch line over in Davis which comes off from a slightly different angle, they come together at this point right on the river. Everything’s all squeezed together, so the railroad station and its platform actually projected out over the river. In between that and all of the industrial facilities, like the Coke Ovens, that are still visible just across where the tracks were.