RE: (erielack) DL&W 4 track / 2 track

["Montgomery, Edward T" <Edward.Montgomery_@_fcps.edu>]

Paul,

I was too young to know what was going on but here's what I think
happened.  CTC was probably installed in segments.  I suspect the center
track was converted to CTC and run from Mountain View Tower.  East of
Mountain View was probably ABS until 1959.  I was at Mountain View
station one summer afternoon in the late 50s when the mailman showed up
to meet the train.  He told me that the train had been running late
often because of trackwork.  The trackwork was the ripping out of the
westbound track from west of Lincoln Part to Montville.  I was surprised
when my father told me that a guy he worked with was getting railroad
ties for his property.  I found it hard to believe that the Boonton
Line, the big mainline would be single tracked.  When I entered junior
high I noticed Lackawanna maintenance of way people working on signals.
I was surprised one day to see the westbound signals were relocated to
the center of the now-unused westbound track.  For a while I had hoped
this was temporary.  The westbound track remained in place, out of
service from about 1959 to around 1962 between Paterson and Lincoln
Park. Then one day the rails were gone, followed by the ties and
ballast.  I guess it was all reused somewhere.

A "doghouse" was installed on the westbound side of the crossing,
controlling the Greenwood Lake crossing.  DL&W and EL ETTs explain its
operation.  This system was integrated into but worked seperately from
the CTC system installed.  The machine that controlled the line from
Paterson to Montville was located in the ferry building in Hoboken.
There were some comments about that earlier this year.

I wished I had visited the tower.  A distant relative, Sid Sauter, was
the night operator there for years.  If I recall correctly, there were
no electric lights in the tower.  A few years ago I met his son who told
me that the facility was spotless.  All of the levers were polished and
you could probably eat off the floor.

Ed Montgomery

 

- -----Original Message-----
From: Tupaczewski, Paul R (Paul) [mailto:paultup_@_alcatel-lucent.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 1:00 PM
To: EL Mail List
Subject: RE: (erielack) DL&W 4 track / 2 track

Ed Montgomery wrote:

> Mountain View Tower lasted up to around 1957.  It controlled the 
> crossing and many of the electrically locked switches between the 
> Totowa
> area and Boonton.   I think it controlled the crossovers at Lincoln
> Park.  Once on the center track it was a straight run through the 
> Denville flyover to Dover.

Jack Emerick showed a REALLY NEAT interior shot of Mountain View tower
at the recent ELHS Eastern Region Spring Meeting, and what intrigued me
is that there was a small CTC panel on the right side of the levers in
the tower that controlled Lincoln Park to Boonton (similar to the small
CTC panel that was at Port Morris, which controlled all the way out to -
and including - Slateford Jct). I assume this was added the same time
the line was CTC'ed?

And I assume that a centralized dispatcher didn't control the entire
Boonton Line? From the photo, it appears that Mountain View controlled
the NY&GL/DL&W crossing there, plus the Boonton Line all the way west to
West Boonton (and I assume Denville Tower controlled west from that
point?)

Who controlled Mountain View east?

	- Paul

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