scentzilla
VC Interlocking Tower
This is VC Tower, an interlocking rail station located slightly one block east-ish of Portland, OR's Union Station. My husband worked there during the 90s, and was present for its last throes of life.
The Tower finally closed in November of 1997, when the Union Pacific changed the operations of this tower from a local manual system to the automated process controlled by the huge centralized UP dispatch center in Omaha, NE. VC Tower at one time also served as a telegraphing office. The top floor contained all the big brass handled controls for signals and switches, as well as a direct phone line to the Steel Bridge, which was accessed by an old-timey style phone mounted to the interlocking machine on an accordion arm. The bottom floor contained the bulk of the interlocking machine.
The window at top left in the photo was used back in the day (before modern communication technology) to pass paper messages via pole to the train engine crew. The window came so close to the engine cab it seemed like you could almost reach your arm out and shake hands with the engineer. Sure, the engineer was separated by feet rather than inches, but I'd never been that close to a working, moving train in my entire life. It was nearly like a drive-thru window at Taco Bell - reflective of just how short the distance viscerally felt between the window and the cab.
The roar of the oncoming trains was awesome, sounding like doom pouring down a mountain: an avalanche of metal machinery bearing towards you over the tracks. The early 20th century brick building would shiver and shake as trains approached; it felt like the little tower was trembling in fear. It was amazing, really - experiencing the sensational rumble and energy-rich vibration from a train without physically being upon it impressed itself forever upon my memory. Previously having seen the engineers of trains solely pass by only in a blur, it felt unreal to me to examine their faces as something concrete and specific.
One of the neatest features inside the building was an old transit board, hanging above the windows, displaying the surrounding track that fell within VC Tower's control. It showed a bit of local rail history, containing mentions of switches and tracks that no longer existed, as well as prominently labeling the contents of the board as Northern Pacific property. The board would light up individual LEDs when and where a signal was active. There was also some sort of needled meter on the board, but not being a railroad employee myself, I can't say what the lighted meter was for - I only took notice of "oooh! shiny lights!" (I'm shallow, sadly, what can I say?)
The interior surfaces of the building were rather richly coated in the accumulated grease and dust of the century, and while exuding an ostensible tidiness, the room upstairs simply could not escape the dirt and grime of being railroad property. The guys who worked there didn't take any especial notice of this, so it's perhaps telling that I, as a female and an outsider to the job, DID notice this particular detail.
The guys who worked there in the 90s put up with one oddly similar working condition that film actors I've known do when they're on set - long periods of interminable boredom and waiting, punctuated by bursts of over-busy activity and hustling to get the work done. Those VC Tower guys unfortunately were also charged with chasing off trespassers/vagrants who might want to sleep on the tracks, which could be a scary and risky endeavor indeed.
One of the former VC Tower employees sued for injuries resulting from falling asleep and tipping over in his chair on-the-job, and he did so successfully.... It was a long-standing pejorative joke about the particular employee himself, which is why I think I got to hear of it.
This is actually the second VC Tower. The original was a wooden structure, with the brick structure built to replace the first. The scuttlebutt is that the wooden building burned down, thus necessitating a new tower. Railroader gossip also holds that VC Tower was one of the last of its kind, if not THE last, in the United States.
The real pity about the preservation of this building comes down to the utter neglect of the Tower's interior contents - while VC Tower was initially supposed to be preserved in whole, the contents of the structure were ultimately left to the homeless squatters who slept in the building rather than by the historical society officially charged with its preservation. This means much of the old documents and diagrams/blueprints were used up as toilet paper and/or scrapped material long ago by those myriad trespassers. Some of the old blueprints showed old city street/line planning and technical specifications that are now lost into the mists of history because they were not immediately conserved into a library. Instead they were left to sit inside the unguarded (officially protected by railroad police, but unofficially easily trespassable for anyone able to break a window) building for casual destruction. As it turned out, the only thing remaining inviolable is the brick structure itself. Lots of stuff is now disappeared, representing a real loss to both railroad history buffs and to historical preservationists of the City of Portland.
My information here comes either from railroader (specifically via pre-'85 guys from Portland) lore or from my own observations both current and when visiting my then-boyfriend/now-husband and his co-workers at work at VC Tower.
The VC Interlocking Tower is now being given new life thanks to Portland's TriMet light rail line - an article on this proposal has been written up in a Portland Tribune article. In particular I love that the PT article makes sure to mention and define the railroader slang of "foamer." It used to drive those poor VC Tower guys nuts when the foamers would give them such idiotic grief that they couldn't get inside the Tower to take a million pictures. In Great Britain they have "trainspotters," but in the U.S., we have their less passive cousins, the "foamers."
VC Interlocking Tower
This is VC Tower, an interlocking rail station located slightly one block east-ish of Portland, OR's Union Station. My husband worked there during the 90s, and was present for its last throes of life.
The Tower finally closed in November of 1997, when the Union Pacific changed the operations of this tower from a local manual system to the automated process controlled by the huge centralized UP dispatch center in Omaha, NE. VC Tower at one time also served as a telegraphing office. The top floor contained all the big brass handled controls for signals and switches, as well as a direct phone line to the Steel Bridge, which was accessed by an old-timey style phone mounted to the interlocking machine on an accordion arm. The bottom floor contained the bulk of the interlocking machine.
The window at top left in the photo was used back in the day (before modern communication technology) to pass paper messages via pole to the train engine crew. The window came so close to the engine cab it seemed like you could almost reach your arm out and shake hands with the engineer. Sure, the engineer was separated by feet rather than inches, but I'd never been that close to a working, moving train in my entire life. It was nearly like a drive-thru window at Taco Bell - reflective of just how short the distance viscerally felt between the window and the cab.
The roar of the oncoming trains was awesome, sounding like doom pouring down a mountain: an avalanche of metal machinery bearing towards you over the tracks. The early 20th century brick building would shiver and shake as trains approached; it felt like the little tower was trembling in fear. It was amazing, really - experiencing the sensational rumble and energy-rich vibration from a train without physically being upon it impressed itself forever upon my memory. Previously having seen the engineers of trains solely pass by only in a blur, it felt unreal to me to examine their faces as something concrete and specific.
One of the neatest features inside the building was an old transit board, hanging above the windows, displaying the surrounding track that fell within VC Tower's control. It showed a bit of local rail history, containing mentions of switches and tracks that no longer existed, as well as prominently labeling the contents of the board as Northern Pacific property. The board would light up individual LEDs when and where a signal was active. There was also some sort of needled meter on the board, but not being a railroad employee myself, I can't say what the lighted meter was for - I only took notice of "oooh! shiny lights!" (I'm shallow, sadly, what can I say?)
The interior surfaces of the building were rather richly coated in the accumulated grease and dust of the century, and while exuding an ostensible tidiness, the room upstairs simply could not escape the dirt and grime of being railroad property. The guys who worked there didn't take any especial notice of this, so it's perhaps telling that I, as a female and an outsider to the job, DID notice this particular detail.
The guys who worked there in the 90s put up with one oddly similar working condition that film actors I've known do when they're on set - long periods of interminable boredom and waiting, punctuated by bursts of over-busy activity and hustling to get the work done. Those VC Tower guys unfortunately were also charged with chasing off trespassers/vagrants who might want to sleep on the tracks, which could be a scary and risky endeavor indeed.
One of the former VC Tower employees sued for injuries resulting from falling asleep and tipping over in his chair on-the-job, and he did so successfully.... It was a long-standing pejorative joke about the particular employee himself, which is why I think I got to hear of it.
This is actually the second VC Tower. The original was a wooden structure, with the brick structure built to replace the first. The scuttlebutt is that the wooden building burned down, thus necessitating a new tower. Railroader gossip also holds that VC Tower was one of the last of its kind, if not THE last, in the United States.
The real pity about the preservation of this building comes down to the utter neglect of the Tower's interior contents - while VC Tower was initially supposed to be preserved in whole, the contents of the structure were ultimately left to the homeless squatters who slept in the building rather than by the historical society officially charged with its preservation. This means much of the old documents and diagrams/blueprints were used up as toilet paper and/or scrapped material long ago by those myriad trespassers. Some of the old blueprints showed old city street/line planning and technical specifications that are now lost into the mists of history because they were not immediately conserved into a library. Instead they were left to sit inside the unguarded (officially protected by railroad police, but unofficially easily trespassable for anyone able to break a window) building for casual destruction. As it turned out, the only thing remaining inviolable is the brick structure itself. Lots of stuff is now disappeared, representing a real loss to both railroad history buffs and to historical preservationists of the City of Portland.
My information here comes either from railroader (specifically via pre-'85 guys from Portland) lore or from my own observations both current and when visiting my then-boyfriend/now-husband and his co-workers at work at VC Tower.
The VC Interlocking Tower is now being given new life thanks to Portland's TriMet light rail line - an article on this proposal has been written up in a Portland Tribune article. In particular I love that the PT article makes sure to mention and define the railroader slang of "foamer." It used to drive those poor VC Tower guys nuts when the foamers would give them such idiotic grief that they couldn't get inside the Tower to take a million pictures. In Great Britain they have "trainspotters," but in the U.S., we have their less passive cousins, the "foamers."