TOWER OPERATORS KEEP RAIL TRAFFIC ON TRACK
[United Transportation Union, 7-9-07, from Herald News feature]
RAHWAY, N.J. - High up and out of sight, three men in a brick tower push the levers that move trains through a crucial, high-speed junction of the Northeast Corridor -- the line that carries more railroad passengers than any other in the country, the Herald News reports.
Now that most train movements are controlled remotely by computer, the old-fashioned job of train signaling may seem like a long-lost art. But at this tower in Rahway, men operating levers, gears and switches still do work that has become a point-and-click exercise almost everywhere else.
And that's just the way these old-timers like it.
"It's a disgrace using a mouse," Willie Genovario, a mustachioed 55-year-old, said with a smile.
Genovario joined the railroad before Amtrak existed, and he stayed put as colleagues migrated to New York, where they watch a billboard-size monitor that shows the comings and goings of trains along New Jersey's 57-mile corridor.
With the world around them gone digital, Genovario and his two co-workers -- James Nugent and Donny Storniolo -- proudly do their jobs as if it were still 1914, the year the tower's massive interlocking machine was built.
An early type of computer, the machine controls signals that mean the difference between a safe journey and a disastrous collision. Few remain, but Union Tower's machine is still clicking, handled with care by a group of employees such as Genovario who guard its place in time.
"They've been closing towers ever since I started," he said. "I've seen them close a lot of them down. It's a bad feeling."
Fortunately for Genovario, there are still a few left, and he has always managed to land in one. He prefers the tower, he said, because "in the offices, you have everybody up there yelling at you." Now that he has the day shift, he doesn't plan to give it up.
Tower life moves in fits and starts, not unlike the pace of a firehouse. But the job is always serious, especially at Union interlocking.
The interlocking, a type of complicated junction, is the confluence of two busy lines: NJ Transit's North Jersey Coast Line and the Northeast Corridor. The Coast Line joins the corridor via a "flying junction" -- two tunnels that permit trains to "fly over" the corridor without interrupting its flow.
Between 6 and 10 a.m., 110 Amtrak and NJ Transit trains pass through the interlocking. A train buzzes by the tower every couple of minutes during rush hour. NJ Transit makes things even busier by adding new trains to its schedule every year.
Some newcomers are tripped up by the dynamic nature of the operation, Amtrak employees said. Workers have to keep track of many things at once -- express, freight and local trains all are working their way toward and through the junction.
Switching a local or freight train over several tracks at the wrong time can clog up the path for a high-speed train, whose schedules are closely scrutinized by top managers.
Some would-be signalmen never get it. The job is too abstract for them, said Bill Strassner, a retired railroad employee who worked in several signal towers, including Union, for Conrail.
"We always likened towermen to [players in] a chess game," he said. "You want to plan your moves in advance. You have to look three moves down the road -- if I do this, what happens to this train or that one?"
This is almost second nature to Genovario, who keeps track of train schedules on two flat-screen monitors. In addition to Union, he and his co-workers control another interlocking near Elizabeth known as Elmora.
Storniolo, 27, is the youngest of the gang, and still was "posting" -- railroad slang for training -- under Nugent.
When Genovario shouted "Go 3 to B at Elmora," Storniolo moved three levers. Two of the levers opened switches that allowed a train to move from an inside track to an outside one. The third lever activated a signal that told the engineer it was safe to make the moves.
It looks easy, and qualifying to operate the machine takes only two and one-half weeks. But the wrong signal could cause a catastrophe. So what happens if the machine malfunctions?
"You just smack the board with a stick," Storniolo said, to a burst of laughter from his colleagues. "Old trade secret."
In fact, Amtrak rarely has problems with the machine, which was built to last for decades.
As wide as a church organ, cased in an enduring body of oak, the machine was made by Union Switch and Signal, a Pennsylvania company founded in 1881. The machine's large board displays the junction's six tracks, which zigzag like a series of radio waves.
Its 47 brass levers move dozens of steel bars that control switches and signals. Once a lever is moved, the bars lock in place, preventing other levers from being moved (hence the name "interlocking"). The intent is to keep a leverman from opening a switch that would conflict with a movement he just made.
"It's an amazing art and science," Strassner said.
Yet that art may be lost within four or five years. Amtrak plans to convert the interlocking to the computerized dispatching system managed in New York. The newer system allows one employee to manage six interlockings. It once took three or four people to man every tower.
Once, there were 13 towers in New Jersey, some built during the 1890s, on the former Pennsylvania Railroad between Trenton and New York. Most have been demolished.
Union's closure would be a cause for mourning among rail fans, whose curiosity carried them beyond the world known to commuters.
William Dunwoody, 55, an electrical engineer and rail fan, said he once knocked on the door of a signal tower in Princeton Junction when he was 19 years old. He had been watching the railroad test new high-speed trains, and inside the tower was a massive artifact that made it all possible -- the mighty interlocking machine.
"We trust in electronics and microprocessors," said Dunwoody. "But there is something inherently elegant about the simplicity of the way this equipment was designed. Sometimes, simpler is better."
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