Grand Crossings Interlocking tower.
By 1886 railroad locomotives were larger and trains were running
faster than they had been in 1876. Those developments caused two
new problems; one was safety for passengers and railroad employees.
And the other was avoiding unnecessary delay. The railroads at a
crossing of several tracks had the same problem as the drivers of cars
and trucks on streets which cross each other, and the railroads solved
the problem in ways very much like the ways street and highway
departments do.
When the crossing consisted of only of the Green Bay &
Minnesota track crossing the Milwaukee and St. Paul track it was
sufficient to order all trains to come to a complete stop at the crossing,
like cars at an intersection with a four-way stop sign, and then a
flagman, like a policeman, waved one at a time through the crossing.
That simple arrangement was too slow and dangerous for the traffic of
four railroad lines. In 1886 these railroads agreed with each other (ie,
the Burlington, Milwaukee and North Western did; the Green Bay road
was strangely not part of the agreement) to install and obey a system
of signals and gates by which gates like those which bar cars today from
crossing railroad tracks, were used to bar trains on three of the four
tracks while a train could run through on the fourth one. (ie, the
Burlington, Milwaukee and North Western did; the Green Bay road was
strangely not part of the agreement, However, since they had only one
train a day into La Crosse, perhaps their train had to always come to a
complete stop as in earlier days.) Signals were positioned to tell the
various engineers which trains should stop and which one could go.
This agreement was signed in 1886 and construction began in April
1987. In June, 1987 the completed tower and signals were turned over
to the Milwaukee Road “to perate the new gates across track,”
according to the La Crosse “Republican and Leader.”
That system was adequate for the safety of all concerned as long
as there was a small number of trains running through the crossing, and
such systems continued to be used even into the 1960’s in places were
the volume of traffic remained small. That simple system was not only
time consuming but it was also dangerous when traffic became heavier,
because there was too much chance for human error. A railroad
employee could line up the switches to let the train through on one
track and accidentally position the signal to let the train on another
track come through, and they result would have been a wreck.
Fortunately in 1856 in England a man by the name of John Saxby
invented a machine by which signals and switches were controlled in
one operation and were “interlocked” with each other in a way that
made it mechanically impossible for the operator to position the signals
for a track until the switches for that track and only that track had been
lined up properly and locked in the position, “in such a manner that the
(switch) points cannot be wrong when the signals are right, nor the
signals wrong when the (switch) points are right.” (British patent June,
24 1856) In 1874 Saxby perfected his machine by the introduction of
the rockers that made it work more easily and more securely.
In 1892 the three major La Crosse railroads agreed that the
original system of safety and control at Grand Crossing needed
complete renewal and that a better system was desirable. They decided
to replace the old system with an “improved Saxby and Farmer”
interlocking plant. No better system was known anywhere the time,
and it was one of the first installations of this kind in Wisconsin.
The tower which housed the machinery and its operators had a
unique shape because of two factors: it had to be tall enough to shelter
the machinery and provide the operator with a clear view of the traffic,
and it had to have windows almost all the way around the operator’s
working area because the tower was surrounded by tracks and the
operator at to have a clean view in all directions.
In the early years the interlocking mechanism was entirely
mechanical. The tower operator used muscle power to throw the
levers, called, appropriately, Armstrong levers. The levers were lined up
on an axis just below the level of the floor. The operator had to shove
the top of the lever over several feet; that force was carried by a
system of connected rods and levers down to the track where the
switch points would be moved about eight inches. It worked exactly the
way a manual jack used for raising a car for changing a tire: the action
of the lever was relayed through pivots by which the action could
directed where it was needed. An expert tower operator, Robert
Penrose, described the way it worked: “When the operator heaved the
tower lever, the leveraged force was conveyed vertically to the bottom
of the floor of the tower, pivoted horizontally out to the track, then
pivoted down the track to where the switch or signal was located then
a final pivot into the switch point into the switch point assembly or
signal mechanism. The pipes ran through periodic pulleys which both
supported them and rolled to permit their movement…… When the
levers were thrown, they not only activated the pipes that ran to the
track appliances, but also worked sliding rods within the machine that
blocked or freed other levers for action.” (The High Line, Spring, 1990)
Safety was achieved by a marvel of ingenuity!
Over the next 99 years many important changes were made to
the interlocking equipment and its tower at La Crosse’s Grand Crossing.
In 1902 the Milwaukee Road’s main line was double tracked making it
necessary to add to the machinery and rebuild the system of
connecting rods. When the Green Bay & Western discontinued service
to La Crosse in 1922 there track was removed from the crossing. The
entire plant and tower were destroyed a derailment and rebuilt new.
The tower which has been preserved in Copeland Park is the building
erected in 1928 to replace the one that had been wrecked. It was
installed a bit further east of the original site. Until 1966 the signals
controlled by the operator at Grand Crossing were semaphore type
signals which were replaced in that year with the color light type signals
in use today. The C&NW began to use the Milwaukee Road track in
1986 because the C&NW’s tunnel at Tunnel City had collapsed, so in
1987 CN&W’s track was removed from the crossing.
Economic pressures and the advance of technology conspired to
make the grand old tower and its mechanical interlocking machinery
obsolete. The trainmaster and road master for the Soo Line, Art Danz,
described the closing of Grand Crossing tower: “The decision to close
the tower was tied into the single track project which started around
1986. I came to Portage in September of 1988 and closing the tower
was common knowledge at that point. The tower officially closed at
11:59 p.m on January 28, 1991 Prior to its closing, in the fall of 1990, all
rodding from the tower to the crossover switches and yard leads was
disconnected; all switches were spiked and all movements into and out
of La Crosse yard were made at the west end. Control of the
interlocking officially ended on January 24, 1991, when it was turned
over to the Wisconsin dispatcher in Milwaukee. It was decided to keep
the operators on until the 28th so they could manually flag trains across
in case the new system failed. The new system worked without
problems, however, and the operators spent their last four days as
nothing more than caretakers of the tower. Second trick operator Don
Proksch was the last one to work the tower.