The images show a building that, despite its evident abandonment and decay - with flaking plaster revealing the masonry beneath, bricked-up windows and doors, and spontaneous vegetation creeping through the cracks - still preserves its dignity and structural solidity. Its architecture, typical of rural stations of the era, features a rectangular plan and a sober yet functional façade, with an attached warehouse essential for freight logistics, particularly sulfur transport.
Though gutted and weathered by time and neglect, the building retains its stone-framed openings and balanced proportions, suggesting an original elegance. Nearby, at the entrance to the station area, stands the railway keeper’s house - a more modest, compact structure, also abandoned but still recognizable in its role. Its simple form, with a gabled roof and few openings, reflects its purpose as an operational post for supervising the level crossing and railway section.
Both buildings remain silent witnesses of an interrupted project - architectural ghosts set in a modern urban landscape that heightens their solitude and the memory of an industrial past.
By 1929, with the first section nearly complete and the Delia–Sommatino stretch over 60% advanced, the project underwent major revisions. The route was modified to Canicattì–Riesi–Mazzarino–S. Michele di Ganzaria, to be linked with the under-construction Piazza Armerina–Caltagirone line, and the gauge was changed to standard. Although the Canicattì–Sommatino stretch had been prepared for narrow gauge, subsequent works from Sommatino to Riesi were built anticipating the standard gauge.
In the 1930s, construction extended to the Sommatino–Riesi section, but the sulfur industry’s decline removed the main reason to complete the line. In 1937, the contract with the construction company was dissolved, and the works were permanently halted.
After World War II, the 1948 Sicilian Railway Plan proposed completing only the Canicattì–Riesi section, abandoning the rest - a “second phase” that never came. Thus, the 41.474 km stretch remained unfinished: all civil works - trackbed, bridges, tunnels, and most station buildings - were completed, but the tracks were never laid, leaving behind the silent echo of unrealized industrial hopes.