5:25am Eastbound No. 16 The Chicago Express
5:45pm Westbound No. 5 The Ranger
12:26pm Eastbound No. 6 The Ranger
1:18pm Westbound No. 15 The Fast Fifteen
Passenger service in Norman was very limited in comparision with its northern Santa Fe neighboors. In fact this dinky depot would not serve Norman's 70,000+ population well by todays standards but it is a very attractive structure and probably served the 20,000 population in 1948 very well. Norman was the last stop on the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe for the Ranger No. 5 and the first stop for No. 6. Purcell to the south (timetable west) was the division point between the Gulf lines and the Atchison lines.
Today this depot is a community center. You can rent the depot for receptions and other events. One of the few county seat floorplans that I have ever seen is displayed in the freight room. It is a complete set with elevations as well as window details. Other historical depot events and photographs are detailed in the museum. The exterior restoration gets a "B" in my opinion. Attempts were made outside to restore the original window patterns. The only knocks that I have against this restoration are the non-prototypical light fixtures, the destruction of the surronding platform, the non-prototypical freight doors, and the average brick matching masonry work on the re-closed modified freight door. The interior gets a C- due to its total remodeling with little attention to the original floorplan.
This is probably the most often reproduced of all County Seat plans. If there ever were a county seat standard this is it. It is very similar to depots in Mulvane, KS, Stafford, KS, Kingman, KS, Waynoka, OK, Herford, TX and probably many others scattered about in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. It looks like it might be a nice place to have a regional Santa Fe Railway Historical and Modeling Society mini-convention. What do you think?
Another fixture of the Santa Fe is the telegraph pole. Many are being replaced by underground fiber optic cable and they won't be around for long. This is an effort to preserve these once mission critical now obsolete structures. Of course they have not been used for telegraph signals for decades. It is my understanding that they are used for track signaling. The lady in the photograph is 5'1" for your modeling reference. Extra vertical support brackets were used at every Santa Fe station as is shown here at Norman. Why?