As a railfan, one of the best locations to watch trains when we lived in Rosenberg, TX was Tower 17. Tower 17 was the last railroad interlocking tower in Texas to be deactivated from service. Railroad interlocking towers controlled the operations of two or more different railroads crossings before the days of modern railroad dispatching. Most all tower control cabs were on the second floor so the operator had a good view of the railroad that he controlled.Once when a friend and I were at the tower to watch trains, the operator invited us up to the control room to observe train movements from his vantage point.
My friend Rich (on the right) at the interlocking machine in the control room of Tower 17.
Tower 17 was authorized by the Texas Railroad Commission on July 23, 1903. It controlled the crossing of the Gulf Colorado & Santa (Now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) and the Galveston Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway Company (now Union Pacific).
The tower was in service until February 10, 2004 and was dismantled and moved about a half mile east to the Rosenberg Railroad Museum which is just south of the BNSF tracks. The tower has been restored to its operation condition with track and signals similar to what it would have been in its early days. The railroad crossing is now controlled by a dispatcher in the Union Pacific yard in Spring, TX about 40 miles away.
With mergers and buy outs, the railroads that intersect here today has changed a lot since the tower operations began over a hundred years ago. This map shows the railroads that traverse this crossing now.
About 54 trains pass through this crossing per day. 35 UP trains, 15 BNSF trains, 2 KCS trains and 2 Amtrak Sunset Limited. The Union Pacific dispatcher controls the movement of all the trains. Up, BNSF, and KCS have small railroad yards in Rosenberg.
Tower 17 just after being moved to the Rosenberg Railroad Museum.
Here is the interlocking machine after it had been deactivated. The electro-mechanical interlocker controlled the railroad signal and switches, and only one railroad route could be set up at one time to prevent accidents by allowing only one train trough the crossing at one time.
The inside of the interlocking box showing all the electrical switches .
This interlocking machine is an advance version that controlled the various switches electronically. The original machine was controlled by strong-arm levers, where the tower operator actually opened and closed the switches by pushing and pulling on the levers. Named strong-arm levers because the operator used brute force to move the switch and signals by rods that were connected to these levers.
An example of strong-arm interlocking levers.
Here is the diagram of all the tracks and switches that were in the tower control room. Lights on this diagram indicated to the operator what tracks were aligned with each other.
Here is the controller cabinet at the crossing that replaced the tower operations. Radio signals from the dispatcher in Spring, TX to this cabinet controls the individual switches at the crossing.
New switch activator that opens and closes the switch.
Trains at Tower 17.
In May 2001 Burlington Northern Santa Fe ran an Employee Appreciation Special using the Steam Locomotive Frisco 1522. This Employee Appreciation Special ran from Tulsa, OK trough Oklahoma, OK; Fort Worth, TX; Temple, TX, Rosenberg; TX, Houston, TX and Beaumont, Tx and back to Arkansas City, KS. This steam engine traveled by Tower 17 in late May, 2001. Unfortunately I was in St. Louis at the time visiting family. But my friend Rich was track side at Tower 17 to wave at it as it steamed by. This 4-8-2 'Mountain Type' steam engine was built in 1926 and was in service for the Frisco railroad until its retirement in 1950 and was donated to the Museum of Transportation of St. Louis. It was restored to service in 1988. It ran many excursions until it was retired again in 2002 due to the rising cost of operation. It now remains in display an the museum. This photo was taken in Kirkwood, MO by Richard Sheffold of Crestwood, MO. Courtesy of www.frisco1522.org.
This link will allow you to see and hear this engine in action. Crank up the sound when you watch it! (Note! You must have Real Player running on your computer to see and hear this video.)
For free download of Real Player got to this link.
The back end of it's train as Frisco 1522 passes by Tower 17
This video of Lonnie Donegan singing reminds me of this time of the year growing up on the farm.
Though machines have long since replaced humans in the cotton-growing process, it's hard to imagine anyone who ever had to pick cotton regret that they moved on to other ways of earning a living. In fact, the back-breaking job grew the once-common expression that such and such - practically anything - "sure beat picking cotton." Thus -that's why I became a chemist because - it sure beats picking cotton.
This link takes you to a great story about picking cotton.
I grew up in the heart of cotton growing country in Watson, AR (Desha County - the Arkansas Delta). I still have memories of hoeing cotton in the spring and picking in the fall. In the late 1940's to 1950 schools had what was called summer school. We would go to school about 2 months in the summer with a month off in late spring to help chop cotton and another month off in early fall to help pick. We grew 20-30 acres of cotton. Our farm had 20 acres of cotton land and we would rent around 10 acres. Hoeing or chopping consisted of thinning plants and hoeing out grass and weeds. We would chop all the farm at least twice. This would be from late May through July. Sometimes we would refer to the hoe as a goose necked idiot stick.
This is an example of chopping cotton.
Picking time was early September through October. In years with bad weather, picking could continue until Thanksgiving. Dad could pick around 300 pounds per day. Most of us kids would pick about 200 pounds per day (late teens). A bale of loose cotton was about 1500 pounds. It would take us about 1.5 to 2 days to pick a bale. As we grew older we worked up to the 11 ft. sack. We picked until we were dragging about 60 pounds and take it to the wagon to weigh, then empty into the wagon.
Cotton scales were simple balance type devices that were hung from a board extending from the wagon. The sack was tied to the bottom of the scale and a "P", or small weight, was moved along the arm until it balanced. The weight was then read from the figures along the scale beam where the weight caused it to balance. A large P was used for heavier sacks and a smaller one for small sacks. The reverse side of the scale beam was calibrated for the small P. The crop owner usually designated an official weigher. He weighed all the sacks and kept a record of the amounts each picker brought in. After weighing the sack and the weight of the sack was deducted, the cotton was emptied into the wagon. The wagon bed had high side boards.
This is the type of scales we used to weigh our full cotton sacks.
This is the "P" that would be moved along the arm of the scales
We would have to tramp the loose cotton in the wagon to make sure we could get the required 1500 pounds. Then it was off to the gin. This was done with a mule drawn wagon until about 1953 when we switched to farming with a Ford 9N tractor. About the only fun part of picking was that about once a season we each would get to ride in the wagon to the gin. I can still remember one of my uncles who gave up cotton farming to become what us country folks called a public worker saying "I'd rather have a rattle snake around my neck than a cotton sack strap".
We could produce somewhere between 1 to 2 bales of cotton per acre. Ginned cotton in those days was worth about 40 cents per pound. Thus one bale brought in $200. The cost of planting seed, fertilizer, insecticide used to kill boll weevils, feed for the mules (or tractor fuel and parts), etc had to be subtracted from this figure to give the net return for producing that bale. So you see that with say our 30 acres with a 2 bale per acre yield gave a gross income of $12,000 before operating expenses were subtracted from that. Not much left to support our family with 6 children. It was a hard life, but looking back, I have no regrets and lot of memories.
Here is an example of cotton being picked by hand.
As much as I disliked the hard labor on the farm, I continue to plant a few stalks of cotton in my vegetable garden. In the south the cotton would be planted around mid-April. A cotton bud or square appears first then blooms (late June - early July) first with a white bloom which turns red the next day which then drys up and falls off the third day to show a small boll. The boll continues to grow in size and opens at full maturity to the white fluffy cotton boll.
Cotton Plants
Cotton Square (bud)
White Bloom (Day 1)
Red Bloom (2nd day) with a square to the lower right.
Maturing cotton Boll
Open cotton Boll. This is 4 lock cotton (4 pods of cotton between the burs). Most of what we grew was 5 lock cotton.
Mom & Dad in cotton ready for picking.
As more of us kids grew up and left the farm after graduating from high school, dad switched to having another farmer machine pick his cotton with a mechanical picker.
The early two row pickers would pick about 10 bales a day. Just think of these numbers, if five 300 pound/day hand pickers could pick a bale of cotton per day, then this machine replaced what took 50 good hand pickers to do in a days work. This mechanization is why so many people had to leave the farm for work in the cities as hand labor disappeared. Now there are 6-8 row pickers, replacing what it took 150-200 good men to pick in one days work. With 6-8 row pickers that would pick 30-40 bales/day, brought about other changes in the picking-ginning process. With a two row picker the farmer would collect his loose picked cotton in a 10 bale wire trailer that would make one trip a day to the gin.
As faster pickers appeared it meant that as much as 4 trailer loads a day would need to be took to the gin. This created a major logistics problem of needing more trailers and keeping a person at the gin to move trailers through the long waiting line at the gin. This brought on a new invention in the early 1970's, the cotton module builder.
The picked cotton would be dumped from the picker into a machine that worked similar to a garbage truck. It was a hydraulic press that pressed the cotton into a smaller space. This produced a tightly pressed cotton module that would shed moisture and could be left in the fields to wait for moving to the gin.
Here is a video of a module builder at work.
Technology has now progressed to the point that the picker and the module builder has been combined into one machine, the cotton module picker.
Finished cotton modules in Missouri Boot Hill along I-55.
Or it could be hauled in a module truck to a large gin lot, waiting its turn for ginning.I have seen gins in Texas that would have several hundred modules in storage in their lots.
A module truck loading a module.
These modules contained about 11 tons of cotton, almost 15 bales. The gins are operating well past the harvesting time, just to work off the volume of cotton modules coming in. This created the need for faster gins. Modern gins today can gin a bale of cotton per minute. This means 1400 bales per 24 hour day. My guess is that the gin we used in 1940-60 would take a month of 8-10 hour days to gin as much cotton as the modern gin does in one 24 hour day of operation.
The use of herbicides and a hill drop planter has eliminated the need for chopping cotton and the mechanical picker has replaced hand picking. Today's cotton farming is much different than when I grew up on a small farm. With the mechanization, farm size has increased from 100 acre farms to a thousand or more with just 2 or 3 workers to operate the large farm.
The cotton gin building that did our ginning still stands today in Watson, AR although it has not operated for over 30 years. There are 2, more efficient gins about 10 miles in opposite directions from the old gin. I have no idea if all the ginning equipment is still in the old building.
When we lived in Texas we visited the historic 1914 Burton Farmers Gin that is nestled in the heart of Burton, Texas - located on the same site where it was built almost 100 years ago!
This gin was originally powered by a steam engine, but switched in 1925 to a Bessemer Type IV diesel oil engine. The restored 16 ton “Lady B” is the largest internal combustion engine of its vintage still operating in America! It still gins a bale or two of cotton each year at the annual Cotton Gin Festival, the third weekend in April. The gin is now part of the Smithsonian Institution. The cotton that is ginned during the festival is hand picked, just as it would have been in its early days.
The 1925 Bessemer diesel oil engine.
Wagon load of cotton under the vacuum tube. The tube was pulled down into the wagon and sucked the cotton directly into the ginning mechanism.
Workers keeping an eye on the historic wooden gin stands that separates the cotton lint from the seeds.
The ginned cotton would drop into of these presses on a turn table. While one press was being filled with the ginned cotton, the previously ginned bale could be removed from the other press for weighing. The table would then it be rotated to switch to the other press to remove another bale.
Weighing the finished bale.
I am standing by a bale of cotton ginned in this gin. This gives you an idea of the size of a bale of ginned cotton. In the ginning process the 1500 pounds of loose cotton (with seeds) is reduced to a 500 pound bale of compressed lint cotton. The ginning process has removed 1000 pounds of moisture (in the dryers), seed, burs, sticks, leaves and other trash.
Here is a link describing the basic operations of a modern cotton gin. Scrool down and click on the video of "Inside the Cotton Gin" to see a gin in operation.
On June 15 we visited Missouri Botanical Garden with our daughter and the grandchildren on the occasion of its 150th anniversary (PDF Map of garden). This is one the great places to visit in St. Louis and we had not been there in probably 15 plus years. It is a beautiful place to visit any season of the year. On this day, 150 years to the day of it's being opened to the public, the admission price was $1.50 (150 pennies) instead of the usual $8.00. We spent a lot of time in the Victorian District of the garden which is the historic heart of the garden when it was founded in 1859. Here we toured Tower Grove House (the Home of Henry Shaw, founder of the garden) and his library building (closed to the public for many years).
Tower Grove House (Henry Shaw's Home) - Two different views
Henry Shaw's Burial Place
We enjoyed the beautiful Victorian garden around Tower Grove House while the grandchildren were completing a treasure hunt for garden features in that area.
Another area that we spent a lot of time in was the Japanese Garden which is the largest traditional Japanese Garden in North America. The Japanese Garden consists of a four-acre lake that is complemented with waterfalls, streams, water-filled basins, and stone lanterns. Dry gravel gardens are raked into beautiful, rippling patterns. Four islands rise from the lake to form symbolic images. Several Japanese bridges link shorelines; families delight in feeding the giant “koi” (Japanese carp).
Another favorite area is the Climatron (a tropical rain forest inside the world’s first geodesic dome greenhouse)..
They are so many different areas to visit such as:
Children's Garden Vegetable Garden
Lily Gardens
Many Rose Gardens Many flower beds Fountains Blown Glass Sculpture in Ridgeway Visitor Center.
Every season is a great time to visit the gardens as the variety of flowers in bloom change with each season.
The Missouri Botanical Garden was founded for “the promotion of knowledge.” It has many education opportunities and is a global center for studies of botany, biology, and horticulture.
Now that we live in St. Peters, Mo(St. Charles County, 35 miles to garden) it is not as convienient to visit the garden as it was when we lived in Webster Groves (St. Louis County 7 miles to garden). Also the admission is higher for St. Charles County residents.
My friend Rich (on the right) at the interlocking machine in the control room of Tower 17.
Tower 17 was authorized by the Texas Railroad Commission on July 23, 1903. It controlled the crossing of the Gulf Colorado & Santa (Now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) and the Galveston Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway Company (now Union Pacific).
The tower was in service until February 10, 2004 and was dismantled and moved about a half mile east to the Rosenberg Railroad Museum which is just south of the BNSF tracks. The tower has been restored to its operation condition with track and signals similar to what it would have been in its early days. The railroad crossing is now controlled by a dispatcher in the Union Pacific yard in Spring, TX about 40 miles away.
About 54 trains pass through this crossing per day. 35 UP trains, 15 BNSF trains, 2 KCS trains and 2 Amtrak Sunset Limited. The Union Pacific dispatcher controls the movement of all the trains. Up, BNSF, and KCS have small railroad yards in Rosenberg.
Here is the interlocking machine after it had been deactivated. The electro-mechanical interlocker controlled the railroad signal and switches, and only one railroad route could be set up at one time to prevent accidents by allowing only one train trough the crossing at one time.
The inside of the interlocking box showing all the electrical switches .
Here is the controller cabinet at the crossing that replaced the tower operations. Radio signals from the dispatcher in Spring, TX to this cabinet controls the individual switches at the crossing.
New switch activator that opens and closes the switch.
Trains at Tower 17.
This link will allow you to see and hear this engine in action. Crank up the sound when you watch it! (Note! You must have Real Player running on your computer to see and hear this video.)
