interlocking towers question

[Anonymous]

Bearclaw: I wouldn't get too caught up in the size of the tower making it a tower -- it's what it does, not what it looks like that counts. There are hugely complex towers with over a hundred of levers and hundreds of train movements daily that are located in one-story shacks. And there are classic towers right out of the Revell box that had all of FOUR levers and actually threw one maybe once every other day.

[Anonymous]

Mark,

Thanks greatly for the explanation.

I forgot about the tower controlling the crossing gates at Broadway at Blue Island Crossing.

Calling the small shack for the switchtender at Brighton Park a tower is a HUGE STRETCH of the imagination!!

[Anonymous]

Other things a tower controls:

Yards. Very common, as you noted. Almost every large, active yard has a tower (if not more than one) so that the yardmaster can see what is going on. Sometimes there are no direct controls of signals or switches in these towers at all, just a man with a phone and a radio. Hump yards almost always put the retarder controls and the controls to the switches between the retarder and the bowl tracks into the tower. Some recent flat-switch yards have some remote-control switches, which are controlled from the tower (example of this is BNSF's Alliance, Texas, Yard).

Crossing Gates and Crossing Guards: There is one of these at Blue Island in southwest Chicago that remains active.

Drawbridges. Still fairly common. Chicago has quite a few of these; I can't recall the names of any off-hand without going to find a July 03 issue, which lists them. Often, but not always, an interlocking is mixed in. The tower at Beaumont, Texas, on KCS controlled about 50 miles of railroad as well as the drawbridge it sat on, until it was remoted one night to Console 4 in Shreveport and I had the dubious honor of being the second dispatcher to sit down and learn how it all worked, from scratch. Oh yeah -- it handled over 50 trains per shift because it sits on top of the Sunset Route, so gets UP, BNSF, and Amtrak, as well as KCS.

Passenger Stations and Coach Yards. Sometimes but not always these contain controls for the yard throat switches. Technically, like yards, these are usually not interlockings, because they don't always have route-lockouts. That is to say, interlockings are called interlockings because the selection of one route locks out ALL conflicting routes: the controls are interlocked with each other. If your plant can handle two or more nonconflicting routes at once, you can do that, but many plants generally can only do one route at a time. Without consulting an expert, I can't recall if Chicago Union Station's Train Director tower is an interlocking or not.

Switchtenders. These are not interlocked, but control signals and/or switches at a junction or crossing. Brighton Park, Chicago, is still active, but always was one story so architecturally is not a tower, yet it is still classified as such.

Dispatching Offices. GTW Blue Island houses dispatchers, though it also includes an interlocking. Since the difference between an interlocking and CTC is rather semantic and really just boils down to a different set of rules, it's difficult to decide where the interlocking side of the dispatcher's CTC board begins and the CTC ends. Many modern CTC consoles contain one or more interlockings both of the manual and automatic variety, and as far as the manual ones are concerned they are indistinguishable from a dispatcher's point of view from regular CTC.

There are probably a couple of other uses of towers past and present that I'm forgetting about.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by wabash1

Interlocking this is a place where a train pulls up and the crew gets a nap.

Interlocking tower this is the place where the guy whos is to run trains is napping

LOL, Wabash, ain't it the truth...

LC

[Anonymous]

I have a question re: Mark Hemphill's reply.

Other than controlling the movements in a rail yard, what are the other functions a tower can provide? Are there any manned and working towers in the Chicago area that do NOT control an interlocking plant or a rail yard?

Originally posted by Mark W. Hemphill

Interlockings and towers are not the same thing, though interlocking machines are often located in towers -- as well as depots and cabins. Similarly, towers are used for lots of things other than housing an interlocking machine.

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