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Professor’s passion for railroads preserves history of depots |
| By
Vicki L. Kroll |
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Sep 15, 2005 |
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Dr. Mark J. Camp was in elementary school when his life became tied to the railroad.
“In 1956, my dad put together our first model train layout in the basement. I was too young to help much, but that got me interested in trains,” he recalled.
That interest grew. When Camp was learning to drive, he and his mom visited Curtice, Ohio, to see two electric locomotives.
“I went there with my camera to get some pictures of those locomotives with the idea of trying to build some models for my train layout,” said the associate professor of earth, ecological and environmental sciences. “I was looking down the track and I saw this railroad station, so I went down there and took some pictures of that, as well.
“Driving home that day, I thought there probably are a lot of little depots like this in small towns around the area and I ought to just drive around and get pictures of them. I didn’t realize at that age that they were fast disappearing. I was just learning to drive.”
Those first photos of a depot were snapped in 1962. Camp started taking a lot more in 1966. And he’s still chugging along.
His lifelong hobby led to a book, Railroad Depots of Northwest Ohio, which came out in July. The 128-page work is a pictorial review of some of the more than 250 depots in 14 northwest Ohio counties that served the public during the days dominated by rail travel. The images are accompanied by historical information Camp gathered over the years at libraries and from interviews.
“I had most of the data organized in files by towns and railroads, and I just had to pull it together,” he said. “I have a pretty good collection of depot photos from Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, and I collect postcards to get the images of ones that have been long gone.”
Camp clarified the difference between railroad depots and stations. “A depot is actually a building to house people waiting for trains. The station is just a geographic point on the tracks for railroad use only. There might be a depot there, there might not. It might be out in someone’s cornfield. It’s a station to the railroad, but there’d be no provisions to pick up passengers there.”
Most area depots are gone due to progress or neglect, he said. Some still exist, and the book closes with a chapter on depot reuse. “I’m often asked what’s the common reuse of a depot,” he said. “It’s hard to say, but it’s probably either a museum combination visitor center or a restaurant.”
Local depots turned museums are in Sylvania, Maumee and Pemberville. And the depot in Waterville serves passengers of the Bluebird train.
Camp, one of the directors of the Railroad Station Historical Society, is working on more books about depots in the Buckeye State that will be published down the line. The series is part of the Images of Rail series issued by Arcadia Publishing.
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