MOORPARK'S `OLD DEPOT' IS SOMETHING TO CROW ABOUT.

Byline: Paul O'Donoghue Daily News Staff Writer

Is it or isn't it a train depot?

That's the question Moorpark downtowners frequently hear visitors ask about the building on High Street that looks like an old-time Southern Pacific Railroad depot but is really just a false front for a chicken-feed mill.

``Most people think it's the old depot when it's nothing but a shell over a grain mill,'' chuckles Will Whitaker, who owns a hardware store across the street that has been run by his family since 1929.

And it's no wonder visitors - even knowledgeable ones - are fooled as the wood-sided, Western-style building sits alongside the railroad tracks downtown and is liveried in Southern Pacific's traditional gold terra cotta-color trim and green roof tiles. In fact, all the silos, pipes, elevators and chutes are painted in gold.

``All of Southern Pacific's buildings were painted like that,'' says Patricia Havens, director of Simi Valley's Strathearn Historical Park and Museum.

But Southern Pacific tore down the old depot in the mid-'70s. A spartan Metrolink station has been built a bit east of where the old depot sat near High Street and Moorpark Avenue.

At the front of the mill is a two-story false-front building on a yard of dirt and concrete, separated from High Street by a leafy hedge and sprouting red flowers. Locals call the complex behind the false front the ``grain mill.''

The mill buildings are a large-scale reproduction of the old Southern Pacific depot, says local real estate agent John Newton.

S&K Ranch constructed the reproduction in 1979, at a cost of $225,000, as a way to curry favor with the community, says Newton, who was employed by the company at the time and oversaw the project.

S&K wanted to fix up the mill and expand operations, which meant more traffic and noise right in the center of town. To win community support for the expansion and revamp, S&K hit on the idea of building an exterior to conceal the operation, says Newton.

So S&K went to the Moorpark Planning and Architectural Review Committee, a local panel that advised the county Board of Supervisors - Moorpark was not yet a city - with three proposals, including the depot reproduction and a Spanish adobe-type building.

The panel chose the reproduction because it ``really struck both a historic and aesthetic chord,'' says Newton, explaining that previously some locals had tried unsuccessfully to raise funds to preserve the old train depot.

``I'm really proud of that. Everybody won on that one,'' he says.

In fact, the exterior looks so real that it has been used in movies, says Newton, although he can't recall which ones.

The city's redevelopment agency has owned the land on which the building sits, as well as most of the land on the south side of historic High Street since the 1990s. The agency leases the land for $1,440 a month to Ontario-based Eggs West, which runs an egg ranch just northwest of the city.

But the company owns the building, said Eggs West co-owner Jeff Foster, having bought it from S&K in 1985.

Charles Schwabauer, who has lived in Moorpark since 1962, says the false front solves a problem by covering up the pipes, elevators, stores and large silos that hold hundreds of tons of grain and other ingredients that are mixed to form the chicken feed.

``It makes a rather objectionable use not a real problem,'' says Schwabauer, 71, a member of the Moorpark Historical Society.

``We have a lot of newcomers coming into town who think it's part of the old depot, which it actually is not.''

Foster of Eggs West says the site has a long connection with grain.

``There's been a feed mill on that site since the 1930s at least,'' he says.

The complex actually consists of two buildings - the two-story false front and, behind it, a longer single-story storage building abutting a siding where railroad cars drop grain, milo, soya beans and other ingredients of the chicken feed onto chutes.

Trucks, too, deliver ingredients, which are dropped into chutes in which augerlike devices move them to the silos.

The ingredients are then mixed and stored, and the feed is then shuttled along other chutes to silos in the ceiling of the two-story building.

When the time is right, the chicken feed is dropped from the silos into trucks, which then transport the feed to the hungry hens.

So what's next for the old mill?

It appears set to continue as it's been for some time, but when its days as a mill are over, Newton says, it could be revamped into a commercial development, as other cities have done with old rail depots.

``I think it could be reconfigured to be developed into specialty shops and restaurants, and become quite a significant attraction for the downtown area,'' he says.