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Quietness, charm and a caboose to boot

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published October 1, 2005

[Times photos: Lance Aram Rothstein]

Railroad objects decorate the front yard at the home of Wes and Karen Coscia in Blanton. Trains are Wes Coscia's passion, and he has devoted several areas of their home to displaying everything from antique railroad schedule boards to oil cans and spittoons from Florida and Georgia railroads.

	Wes Coscia enjoys having room to display his collection of glass railroad lanterns. Karen often joins him when he travels to railroad shows.

BLANTON - From the end of the long, sun-dappled driveway, Wes and Karen Coscia's house looks the perfect country cottage: It's yellow with a deep-red door and big folk-art star affixed to the front, a green shingle roof and a wrap-around front porch that seems to smile and hug the whole house.

Wooden rockers beckon a visitor to sit a spell.

Wind whooshes in the tall pines.

Exactly the kind of karma the family welcomed.

"We were attracted to the rolling hills, the country, the rural quietness," explains Coscia, who moved his family to Hyland Farms from Carrollwood in 1998. "We didn't want to stay in Tampa, and we liked the small-town atmosphere of the Dade City area."

Coscia, a Pasco County custom home builder, built his 3,200-square-foot, four-bedroom house with a pool and connecting outdoor kitchen on 61/2 wooded acres.

Back then, before the real-estate bonanza, he says, land in Blanton was downright cheap. He bought his patch of Florida paradise for $39,000 - and a lot of sweat equity. The family spent months partially clearing the land, a former orange grove dense with pine trees.

"We came every weekend and worked on it, clearing it and grading it," he says. "We worked very hard."

The two-story home, designed by a North Carolina architect who specializes in country-style dwellings, connects with the earthy landscape like an old friend. Inside the walls are painted a toasty shade of yellow ocher, the ceilings are tongue-and-groove pine warmed with a light stain, the floors are rich hardwood.

Coscia's trademark beadboard accents and wainscoting abound.

Built-in shelves and tables of well-thumbed books make for a cozy world for the couple's busy brood that includes two daughters, Alyson, 17, and Olivia, 11, and son, Ross, 20, a student at the University of Florida who visits often.

But their much-loved house also serves another purpose, one that would make any museum curator - not to mention Martha Stewart - proud. Their traditional home also provides the perfect architectural display space for Wes' serious - and constantly growing - collection of antique railroad collectibles, including a herd of real railroad cars that wait in a hand-built motor car house for a whirl along 290 feet of actual outdoor track.

"Trains are my passion," explains Coscia. "I've always had an interest in them. I like to work on them, collect them and buy and sell them. And I still enjoy riding on them."

Antique railroad schedule boards and depot signs from Florida country towns including Lutz, Lake City and Thonotosassa climb the interior walls and stairwell and ribbon around the high wooden ceilings.

Display is a high art to Wes, 46, and Karen, 42, who both credit each other with creating a living space that is both comfortable as well as functional and aesthetic.

In fact, the collection is so cleverly displayed that it becomes one with the house.

The den holds primarily dozens of old oil cans, spittoons and colored glass railroad lanterns, "used for signaling, to make trains stop and go," notes Coscia, who started collecting in 1979 and focuses exclusively on Florida and Georgia railroads.

Coscia, who grew up in Keystone and attended Latoe High School, knows all about the state's legendary railroad barons and where their passenger trains ferried tourists. He can tell you when the Orange Blossom Special last pulled out of a Miami station or how the railroads once delivered passengers to the Port of Tampa, where they boarded steamships to Cuba.

His extensive knowledge, garnered through books and at shows, helps him know history and value, and has become second nature.

"I've been into trains since I was a child and my grandpa bought me toy trains," says Coscia, who displays his grandfather's railroad watch commemorating his years as a section foreman on the Great Northern Railroad.

Glass cabinets hold precious old dining car china and silver from days when trains had names like the Silver Meteor and the Orange Blossom Special streaked through the American countryside.

In the front hallway and living room, shelves holds ephemera from the lost era of passenger trains: an old lounge-car cigarette box, porter's keys, uniform buttons, cap badges, timetables, and playing cards.

From the long-vanished dining cars, he has managed to preserve such artifacts as sugar tongs, soup tureens, gravy boats, a menu holder, a toast cover, even the leather billfold in which the white-jacket-clad waiters once presented customers their checks.

Outside, Coscia keeps a perfectly tended stable of gas-powered maintenance train cars that the railroads stopped using in the 1980s. He also is in the midst of converting a 1949 "safety orange" colored caboose into handsome sleeping quarters, with hardwood flooring, pale-mint green walls, built-in berths, bookshelves, potbelly stove, air conditioning and an entertainment center.

"When it's done, it will really look nice," he says. "We're going to use it for guests."

When he's not working on his collection, traveling with Karen to railroad shows or taking his son to meets at excursion railroads, he likes to putter around his country house and yard.

The couple's shared passion? Gardening.

The postcard-pretty "drought-resistant, natural Florida" garden includes a vine-covered trellis, jasmine, a blue wishing ball and plants that attract plenty of hummingbirds.

"This is why we bought this place," he says with a sigh. In the distance, his lovely old caboose awaits. "It's just hard to find time to work in it."

--Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached at ebettendorf@hotmail.com

[Last modified October 1, 2005, 01:45:17]