FL9

Tower 29 in Saginaw, TX was a manual lever interlocking constructed in 1903 to control the Rock Island’s crossings with the GC&SF and the FW&D.  It was always controlled and manned by the Rock Island up until the end of the Rock, and then by the AT&SF until the tower’s subsequent abandonment and destruction in 1985.  In this first view, I am looking south while standing on the west side of the Santa Fe with the FW&D crossings behind me and the Rock Island crossing visible underneath the pair of Amtrak SDP40F’s on northbound train #16 as it hammers over the diamonds on July 19th, 1975.

Four years later I am now looking north as hot AT&SF train #395 from Kansas City to Houston crosses the Fort Worth & Denver and is about to cross the Rock Island in the foreground on its journey south pulled by a pair of C30-7’s on January 28th, 1979.  The lead unit has remnants of snow on its plow carried down from a heavy storm up in Kansas.  At first I thought the slide had developed an imperfection, but checking with a magnifier that is a large flock of birds flying from east to west in the background.

The view was quite a bit different from today 27 years later when you stand in the Saginaw Chamber of Commerce parking lot and look at the same diamonds, now controlled by CTC signals and radios from about three miles away at BNSF headquarters.