Where was this station located?
Ingleside
There was an icehouse (on the lake) at the end of our street. There’s a boathouse there now. I love repurposed buildings, that were rescued from being abandoned buildings. I’ve stayed in hostels that were brought back from decreptitude.
My favorite was the Nantucket Youth Hostel, that used to be a life-saving station. People would watch from its cupola for whaling ships or fishing boats floundering, then a dozen hands on each longboat would carry them down a ramp and into the surf to rescue survivors.
Damn, looks like it had to be sold during covid. So much for $40/night beds on Nantucket…
The entire region of Chernobyl was abandoned on very short notice when the nuclear reactor there went kablooie back in 1986. People had to evacuate with little more than the clothes on their backs.
To this day, the whole Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a no-man’s land. The houses are rotting away and overgrown with weeds and vines climbing in through the windows.
The shortest direct route from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to the nearest Russian-friendly border passes through the area. So should Ukraine defend the area if Russia invades? Many Ukrainians say: Why bother? But it’s the shortest route to Kyiv, so the Ukraine government feels a need to defend the area.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/defend-chernobyl-during-invasion-why-162127015.html
For a more local stateside story: In the smallish San Joaquin Valley farm town where I live, there are only two traffic lights. On a lot at the corner of one of those lights, and occupying most of a city block, there has been an old bombed-out-looking building.
It was a single-story structure, but with nothing left but a foundation, a roof and rafters, and an array of pillars holding up the roof. It’s been there like that for longer than I’ve lived here (7 years). On one side is a more enclosed structure, but still just as abandoned. I think it was once a school bus depot.
Just within the last two months, the entire structure was finally torn down and the foundation jacked up. Just more recently, they finally finished hauling all the rubble away. Now there’s nothing but an empty bare dirt fenced lot.
The story around town is, there’s going to be a gas station there, with the usual convenience store and a car wash.
A side effect of this, that maybe nobody had thought about, is the town is now overridden by all the displaced refugee pigeons that used to live there. The horizontal parts of the traffic lights at that corner are festooned with pigeons, and they are all over the rest of the town too.