El Reno, OK: Rock Island Backshop

Larry Overby posted

I asked if this was Silvis, IL and learned it was El Reno, OK. One comment indicated it was razed last month. So I decided I better look at a satellite image while it would still be there. It turns out both railroad routes through El Reno were Rock Island. So I had to search all of the track in town before I finally found it.

Satellite

Some photos from its better days.

Doug Hefty posted
El Reno - June, 1973. PHOTO CREDIT: DENNIS SCHMIDT.

Don Gerdts posted

Camera Totin Idiot    No. 16, CRI&P 110

Larry Overby posted

Brian J Hadley posted before and after shots of the interior. His comment: "Here's another before and after of the El Reno shop. Slightly different angle but notice the pit in the foreground."

Which gives me a transition to the shots during the 35 years it stood abandoned.

Doug Hefty shared Dwight Miller's photo.
Abandoned diesel shops in El Reno, OK...CRI&P Railroad...John Mallory The shop complex has not seen use since the RI Trustee concluded his work at the site around 1985

Larry Cooper posted
Larry Cooper They tried to rebuild a few years ago. They were going to run a dinner train and commuters out of the shop and build a museum inside. But the EPA intervened and shut it down. Seems its polluted. Ground is saturated with diesel fuel and the estimates to clean it up was in the millions. Interested parties withdrew.Larry Cooper Jim, a lot of people assume the floors in the shop area are cement. They are not. They are wood covered in years of grease and oil. We dropped a 500 lb. floor jack one day and wooden wedges popped up from the floor. We just pounded them back in place.John Mallory Larry Cooper Good observation. I've noticed toward the west end of the diesel shop an exposed cluster of square-shaped wood pilings. Sounds like the years of spilled grease and oil helped solidify the floor's surface. It does resemble concrete.
[I learned from the comments that  the little building on the right was the paint booth.]

It was torn down in 2016. The railroad route was owned by the state and then UP. But the shop complex was owned by someone else. I agree with a comment that if UP bought the shops as well as the railroad route, they would have quickly leveled it. They want to avoid the scenario I read in a comment about a boy falling through the roof and then rolling into an engine repair pit with water that had oil in (on) it.

Cole D. Glenn posted a 6 photos.

Evan Stair shared

Quentin Clements posted
Yep it's all coming down here in El Reno! They are salvaging the bricks. And I think I got my foot in the door for all the iron.

William A. Shaffer posted

Rock Island Shops

El Reno, OK

(Photo by Kenneth W. Moore - Collection of William .A. Shaffer)