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Depot Fundamentals: 'Station' vs. 'Depot'
Although the terms are often interchanged, there is an important difference between what a railroad calls a station and what they call a depot.

A station is a physical location, perhaps nothing more than a mile-post and a sign with a name on it.
The Southern Pacific Rule Book definition is "... a place identified by name in the timetable."
These places may have a spur track, a corral for unloading livestock, perhaps a freight loading platform, maybe a shelter of some sort, or often a tiny, unattended freight house. But many "stations" never had a place to buy a ticket, wait for a train, or provided a place where passengers were al­lowed to board. At the other extreme, stations could also be large, elaborate facilities with many different structures, including shops, engine houses, water tanks, freight houses, and passenger depots

The depot is the building designed to accommodate passengers, freight, or both. In small depots the handling of this cargo, human and otherwise, was often combined. However, "main track" stations often had separate depots for freight and passengers.
Sometimes depots or "train order offices" were built in places where there were neither passengers or freight business, just to have an operator or telegrapher present to pass along train orders.
These places could be extremely isolated and remote.
Depot historian Henry Bender says, "the depot customarily served two major functions: it helped operate the railroad by coordinating train movements, and it promoted the company's business by selling tickets. There were several ancillary functions too: serving as agencies for railway express, Western Union telegraph services, and others.

Many of these agents were assigned to places that would very rarely have a passenger, or any freight business at all. These places were about three to five miles apart, although on some lines the train order offices in particularly remote locations were sometimes twenty to twenty-five miles apart.

Not all depots were staffed around the clock, and at the remote ones the railroad had to provide some sort of housing for the agent, operator, or telegrapher (all of whom were sometimes the same person). Often thiss housing was a second story on the depot, with a small apartment for the agent and his or her family. If a telegrapher was also assigned to one of these places, he usually got to bunk in a slighdy modified boxcar behind out back of the depot.

As Henry Bender says, "The usual perception people have of depots is that they are places where you go to buy your ticket, then sit in the waiting room until it is time for the train to come".

There was a lot more to it than depot operators communicated by 'telegraphy, a skill that was a job requirement in some places right up to the 1980s.
Each station had a two-letter identifier, rather like the three-letter identifier airports have today, and each message to a particular depot began with those two letters. It was easy for the telegraphers to identify each other just by listening to the way the dots and dashes were sent, a kind of audible signature called a "hand."

"Trains operated normally by 'time-table' authorty," explains Henry Bender.
"Most railroads were single tracked, with sidings every twenty miles or so, with a dispatcher somewhere along the line keeping track of where all the trains were, all the time.
He did so with a large sheet of paper, called a 'train sheet' and often a map, although he knew quite well where all the stations were. He kept track of how each train was progressing, and if all the trains went along according to schedule, he knew when, and where they would meet and pass each other.

The telegraph operator was absolutely essential in this system only when one train was delayed, or if an extra train was added to the schedule, or if an extra "se­tion" was added, as often happened, which is when this thing got very complicated and potentially dangerous
When additional sections were added, it was at this point that the telegraphers in their lonely little telegraph offices became real life savers.
"Extras" were complete additional trains running in the same slot of the timetable, one behind the other. You might have, say, train #26-1, #26-2, and #26-3 all running a section of track usually occupied only by one train, the normal #26
Each train except the last had to show green flags and green lights on the locomotive and the caboose, indicating that additional sections were following.

"The operator played a critical role, even when there were no extras, by reporting when a train went past the depot by transmitting 'OS' to the dispatcher. OS stands for 'on-sheet', and that would be followed by the station identifier, the number of the train, and the time of the passage," explains Henry Bender. "Odd and even numbers were used to indicate direction , odd for westbound, for example"