N.C.O. Railroad Depot – 1910

This 1910 depot served a railroad that ran north into country the big lines ignored. The Nevada-California-Oregon Railway, a narrow-gauge line, struck out from Reno toward the high desert of northeastern California and southern Oregon, hauling livestock, wool, and freight from ranching country with no other rail outlet. Its Reno depot anchored the southern end of the line. The NCO was eventually absorbed and its narrow gauge abandoned, but the Western Pacific used part of its right-of-way to reach Reno. The handsome depot survives downtown, a reminder of the lesser railroad that served Nevada's empty quarter.

What the plaque says

In the 1880s, the Nevada-Oregon Railway (N-C-C) line began operations north to Beckworth, California. In 1884, the new owners, the Moran brothers, renamed the line the Nevada-California-Oregon Railway. They extended the tracks to Lakeview, Oregon, making this line one of the largest narrow gauge railroads in the west. This railroad depot was built in 1910. Architect Fredric DeLongchamps designed the building. He incorporated several architectural styles in the station. The entry porch is in the mission style; the roof eaves are from the Italianate style; and the arched windows and doorways follow the Romanesque Revival style. In 1917, the Western Pacific Railroad purchased the N.C.O. Line from Reno to Herlong, California and standard gauged it. The depot continued to serve the traveling public until 1937.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 0.3 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 18 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 18 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Sand Harbor — 24 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Frederik Joseph DeLongchamps — 0.4 mi
• Site of Nevada’s First Public Library — 0.4 mi
• Grand Army of the Republic Tree — 0.5 mi
• Reno — 0.5 mi