(The following by Bill Lindelof appeared on the Sacramento Bee website on March 26.)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A piece of history vital to transportation in Sacramento is a shadow of its former self, a gutted ending to about a century of service to the railroad.
The historical structure called the Elvas Tower, unremarkable in appearance but noteworthy for its importance to railroading, is no longer needed, having been replaced by computers.
Railroad employees in the tower threw switches to direct trains on tracks. The Elvas operator also activated signals so that train engineers would know to slow or stop or go ahead.
Plans to move the little tower, which in its heyday was manned 24 hours a day, never materialized.
The relocated tower was to stand in a future railroad technology museum in the downtown railyard, said Paul Hammond, director of public programming for the state Railroad Museum.
But the museum does not yet have title to the property where the tech museum would be situated.
So, windows, signs and artifacts have been salvaged by the California State Railroad Museum crews to be used for a future Elvas Tower replica building.
The building also was measured and photographed for replication. A Union Pacific spokesman Friday said he did not know when the shell of the building would be torn down.
The top of the two-story Elvas Tower can barely be seen by motorists traveling along the Capital City Freeway.
Deactivated in 1999, it was the last “interlocking control tower” in the north state. Interlocking towers were key components to the railroad’s movement of freight and passenger trains for much of last century.
Once, 25 towers stood like sentinels across the state, and hundreds of small ones across the nation were strategically placed where tracks met.
Tower operators sent trains down the right tracks, sort of like the traffic controllers of the rails. Up to 30 trains per shift moved past the windows of the old Elvas Tower. Now the tower operators’ work is done in computer-equipped offices in the Roseville train yard.
The Elvas Tower, built sometime between 1907 and 1911, is across the freeway from the old city dump and the rail bridge trestle that burned earlier this month. It sits in the middle of a triangle of tracks.
Through its west windows, workers could see the Sacramento skyline. The Elvas junction is just 3.5 miles from downtown near the neighborhoods of east Sacramento and River Park. From about 1880, the spot was busy with Southern Pacific trains from San Francisco, the Sierra, Oregon and the San Joaquin Valley converging on Sacramento.
When the Elvas Tower was retired, the floor was worn linoleum and the blinds were torn.
The building, 11 by 16 feet at its base and about 30 feet high, is a mess now. Vandals have wreaked havoc with spray paint, and the museum staff and railroad have stripped the structure of its guts.
The California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento was given the building by the Union Pacific Railroad and had plans to move it.
To relocate the building, organizers wanted to saw off the second story and move it.
But that didn’t happen for several reasons, including lack of a place to relocate it in the downtown railyard and also because there was still some live signal wiring inside the tower.
“We couldn’t take the building down right away because it was an active link with Omaha, (Neb.),” the headquarters of Union Pacific Railroad, said Alan Hardy, manager of the railroad museum track programs.
Railroad historians say that from the Civil War, railroad lines had control towers — elevated structures where an operator could sit and see in all directions. The operator could control signals and switches to guide the movement of trains.
Eventually, “mechanical interlocking” systems were developed. The elaborate devices in the tower had control levers that operated switches and signals so trains could not be placed in conflict with each other.
The interlocking equipment at the Elvas Tower was in a large wooden box with many moving parts. In time, the devices were outfitted with electrical relay systems. Around the late 1980s, some tower functions were computerized.
The museum now has the Elvas Tower historic interlocking console in its possession for future placement in a replicated tower.