www.txrrhistory.com - Interlocking Tower 10 - Dallas, Texas
Crossing of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe (GC&SF) Railway and the Houston & Texas Central (H&TC) Railway
Tower 10 was the first numbered electric interlocking in Texas, located in south Dallas at a crossing of the original H&TC north/south main line and the Santa Fe line from Cleburne to Dallas. On 7/23/32 a proposal was submitted by GCSF to combine Towers 10 and 19, and on 9/28/32, a letter was sent by the Railroad Commission (RRC) Engineering Dept. to the Commissioners recommending approval. Tower 10 was near Tower 19, and references in the Tower 19 RRC file to "Interlocker10-19", as well as a detailed interlocking map, lead to the conclusion that even after Towers 10 and 19 were combined in 1933, the interlocking machines were not combined; they were just co-located and they maintained their documentation separately. There are references in the RRC files to "Interlocker 10-19" and a 1961 reference to "Interlockers No. 10 and 22" [Tower 22 being along the Santa Fe line further to the northeast]. Thus, the 1944 listed retirement date of the tower may not correlate with the retirement of the interlocker, and might be a demolition date. In any event, Interlocker 10 was apparently still being used in 1961.
The location of Tower 10 is illustrated on the 1922 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Dallas (see below). The Sanborn map shows that the tower was located on the south side of the diamond (not the north side as I erroneously depicted on the street map! [JGK]). A magnification of the map shows that the "Interlocking Tower" was a 2-story structure with an outer staircase on the west side of the building.
Observations by Frank
Fertitta 1/22/2001
Before DART came along I used to go down to that part of town
to watch the SP switch the Austin Steel plant and some of the
machine shops along Coombs St as well as checking out the Santa
Fe operations at their yard east of this location. The SP switcher
came out of Miller yard past Belt Junction to the northwest toward
Tower 19 and just before it got to the tower it would take the
switch to the right that put it on a track parallel to the Santa
Fe. Once past the backside of Austin Steel it took the crossover
to get to the north side of the Santa Fe tracks and turned to
the north on an interchange track onto the original H&TC line
behind that scrap metal yard and then back across the diamond
to the south to get to the industries along Coombs St. These industries
were originally accessed from the West across SP's own bridge
across S. Ervay but that bridge was torn out some time around
1954 necessitating the movements described earlier.
Location Map Tower 10
