Union Pacific's Parkinson and Underwood Depots

Page 24: [Yermo] The SPLA&SL went a few miles past Daggett to Otis to build a division point. In 1908 Otis became Yermo, a Spanish word that translates as desert or deserted. On July 17, 1971, a westbound waits for a fresh crew at Yermo's stucco-over-masonry depot, built in 1922. The depot housed a cafeteria until the mid-1960s; the house specialty was a prime-rib dinner every Sunday for $3.50. The depot was the work of Los Angeles architects John and Donald Parkinson. Here they attempted to update the aging Mission style with elements from the new Spanish Eclectic style. It was not their best effort, and on subsequent LA&SL depots they reverted to pure Mission style. The UP replaced it in 1981 with a bland steel bungalow.

Page 74: [Kelso] Because Kelso was about as far from civilization as one could go without coming out the other side, the SPLA&SL had to build Kelso from scratch: a roundhouse for a half-dozen helper engines; dwellings for engine crews, blacksmiths, boiler makers, machinists, section men, and their families; fuel tanks, sand towers, tool sheds, etc.; a store, schoolhouse, and post office; and, most important, wells, a softening plant, and storage tanks to dispense the water essential for making steam, boiling coffee, taking baths, and watering the depot lawn.

Kelso's centerpiece was the Kelso Club, built in 1923 to replace an earlier depot. It was a paradigm of Mission-style depot architecture, carefully proportioned and conservatively embellished. While its white stucco walls, red clay tile roof, and dark-green trim were typical for the LA&SL's depots, here, in the midst of an endless desert, it was a brilliant splash of color in a canvas of khaki and olivine.

Inside was a lunchroom, open around the clock, and a waiting room that doubled as Kelso's social center. Upstairs there were bedrooms lining a corridor, each just big enough to hold two narrow iron beds. An arcade along the depot's track side provided a shady place to sit on benches and watch the comings and goings of trains, helpers, and people. Around the depot grew a lush oasis: a lawn, palm trees, cottonwoods, hedges, and flower beds. But where the watering stopped, the desert began, as sharply as if the sod had been cut with a knife.

Page 97: [Caliente, Nevada] To replace a frame depot which burned on September 9, 1921, Caliente received a new Mission-style depot in 1922, a 58-foot-by-207-foot combination station/hotel. Architects John and Donald Parkinson of Los Angeles set the pattern at Caliente for most of the LA&SL's modern depots, with the Mission style. A clubhouse built in 1928 provided additional rooms. The UP gave the depot to the town in 1971; it is now the town hall, police station, and library.

Page 111: [Milford, Utah] In 1923 Milford received its third depot (the first burned down on July 7, 1890), a 30-foot-by-197-foot depot/hotel that was the largest of the classic LA&SL Mission-style depots. This was not the easternmost example of this style on a Harriman railroad: the Utah Light & Railway Co., Salt Lake City's streetcar line (purchased by Harriman in 1906), built a Mission-style shop complex in Salt Lake City in 1908 in red brick instead of white stucco. Sometimes the Mission-style is erroneously called "Mission Revival"; Taco Bells are "Mission Revival," not the LA&SL's depots. The Mission style, a free adaptation of the Southwest's Franciscan missions, was California's counterpart to the Colonial Revival architecture which was then all the rage in the East. The UP tore down Milford's Mission-style depot in 1979, replacing it with a glass, steel, and concrete office building.