Last of a Dying Breed

Operator’s desk

Last fall I shared some ideas with my friend Rick Selva about what I thought was needed at the SONO Switch Tower Museum in South Norwalk, Connecticut. (From this point on I will refer to it as Old Tower 44 like it was called on the New Haven RR. Later on it was called Berk then after it closed and controlled from NYC at the control center, CP 240 & 241.) Rick’s background when he hired out on Conrail was as lineman on the B&A and Maybrook line. His hobby is old communication equipment, and he knows it very well. Rick and I threw around some ideas and I ran them by John Garofalo, who is one of the most dedicated volunteers you could ever meet at the tower. He and his friend Bob Gambling are there almost every weekend from May till October, when we close. Garf, as he likes to be called, was very excited about our ideas and gave us the OK to do it. Rick’s excitement when I told him we could do our project of hooking up the scissor phone and other phones you see in the pictures throughout our three floors was just what I wanted to see and hear. So Rick, Bob Eb and I spent eight hours working to run wires while Rick hooked these antique phones up. His attention to detail was really something to see, even running wire across the back wall to hide a modern-day wire and he used the insulators you see and affixed the wire to it like it was done 100 years ago.

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Indy Interlude


Indianapolis, Indiana, was once a crossroads with numerous railroads calling. The Monon, Big Four, Pennsylvania, Illinois Central and Baltimore & Ohio all called there. Much of the traffic funneled through Indianapolis Union Station, a downtown structure that served all five roads and still stands today.

On the east side of the station, this large brick tower was built to control the many tracks through the station and the interlocking plants at either end. The tower remains today and while it is no longer manned, it continues to house signal equipment.

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Ghost Window

St. Louis Union Station was once one of the busier passenger stations in the United States, with trains of numerous railroads calling on the classic structure. Tracks leading into the station entered on the south side from both the east and west, forming a maze of tracks in the form of a complex wye pattern. The tracks were controlled from a large interlocking tower.

By October of 1991, trains no longer called at Union Station. Most of the tracks were long removed and their location occupied by a parking lot, fountain and retail areas as the building was repurposed in the late eighties. The tower still stood sentinel however; unused, derelict and forlorn.

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Richmond Division Recollections

Part Two
Piedmont Subdivision

Trevillian depot with the village post office in the waiting room.

Trevillian, Pendleton, Buckner, Doswell, Hanover, and Ellerson

Trevillian was a larger wooden depot with the town post office inside the former waiting rooms. I am uncertain what may have been stored in the freight room. Local lore was that the station building was used as a hospital during the civil war, but I am uncertain whether it was the one shown above or an earlier structure.

Pendleton was a closed agency with doors wide open. My understanding is that the agent at Mineral had spent a few hours there daily until the North Anna Power Station at Frederick Hall increased traffic, so that Pendleton became a non-agency station. I retrieved a tariff case from the depot which now resides at Boyce. Read more

The Evolution of ALTO Tower

ALTO tower in 2012 as a pair of NS helpers push past.

Built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1915, ALTO (JK) tower, in Altoona, Pennsylvania, remained in service for the next ninety-seven years, closing in 2012. Over that time it worked under the auspices of four different railroads, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), Penn Central, Conrail and Norfolk Southern and each railroad, in turn, brought something new to the table. It is easy to think of railroad history over the last century to be one of subtraction; infrastructure being removed as a transportation monopoly yielded to competition from air travel and highways. However, for at least its ninety-seven years in service, ALTO’s story was one of adaptation to the ever changing times.

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