This week we turn our attention back to the Maple Valley railway station with a photo of the depot taken on January 20, 1948.
This station was located between the Maple Valley Highway (SR 169) and the railroad tracks.
The site is across the street from the current location of Foley’s Market and the Maple Valley Food Bank and just south of the Maxwell Road underpass.
The Maple Valley depot was an important junction for rail traffic. The station master operated switches to send trains to Black Diamond, Taylor, or towards Landsburg through the Cedar River watershed to Snoqualmie summit.
The set of rail tracks closest to the depot, on which the train in the photo is situated, directed traffic to the coal mines in Black Diamond.
The middle track was the Milwaukee line, which continued to Chicago by way of Snoqualmie.
The outside set of tracks took a sharp turn to the east following Taylor Creek towards Taylor where a logging camp was originally built amidst big stands of timber.
That rail line later served the Denny Clay Company, which established a company town in Taylor in 1895 to make bricks and tile from raw materials available from nearby coal and clay deposits. In 1905 the Denny-Renton Coal & Clay Company assumed operations and business boomed.
In 1927 Gladding-McBean took over manufacturing and operated for the next two decades. Rail service to Taylor ended in 1946 when the City of Seattle won a condemnation lawsuit and shut the town down to better protect its Cedar River water supply.
This photo comes courtesy of JoAnne Matsumura, an Issaquah-based researcher coupled with detailed information from the Maple Valley Historical Society.
