Ancient Web: David Coscia Tracked the Southern Pacific Depots That Survived

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A railway depot can be gone from the tracks and still survive as a library, a restaurant, or somebody's house. David Coscia has spent years noting where the buildings went.

Visit David Coscia's Southern Pacific Railroad website.

The homepage arranges its materials into surviving structures, rolling stock, railroad sounds, models, and equipment diagrams. Its surviving-depots list is the most telling example of the site's method. It runs state by state, recording depots once associated with the Southern Pacific and its subsidiaries, with notes about new locations and uses.

In Arizona, the former Douglas depot is identified as a police building and the Patagonia station as a town hall. In California, one former freight depot became a barn; others were moved to museums or became private residences. The table records street addresses when known and sometimes admits that a location remains uncertain.

History as a changing inventory

The depot page explains that Southern Pacific passenger operations largely ended with Amtrak's creation in May 1971, after years of declining service. Freight facilities also closed as branches were abandoned. The surviving structures are therefore a scattered collection rather than a line you could still ride.

Coscia credits railroad mailing-list participants, historians, and fellow enthusiasts for corrections. His change log makes that collaboration visible. Entries in 2024 and 2025 record demolished buildings, revised locations, recovered freight-car information, and corrections about equipment previously thought to have survived.

Other sections widen the scope. A railroad-in-film index documents appearances by Southern Pacific trains on screen. There are tables of surviving cabooses and steam locomotives, recordings of diesel and steam sounds, and downloadable passenger-car diagrams dated March 1933.

The homepage itself bears an August 2015 date and the site is still updated; an original 1990s launch is not established. It qualifies as a specialist historical archive that retains the character of a manually maintained research index.

The entries are contributed historical leads, not a guarantee that a particular depot remains standing or publicly accessible today. That is precisely why the corrections matter.

Browse the main railroad directory and the depot survival list.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.