Texas Railroad History - Tower 47 - El Paso
A Crossing of the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio
Railway, the
Texas & Pacific Railway, and the El Paso & Northeastern Railway
Above: It's fortunate that
John W Barriger III instinctively photographed virtually every railroad bridge
and building he happened to notice out the rear of his business car. He might
not have known that a similar photo he took of Tower 47 on a recent visit to El
Paso was badly overexposed; he photographed it again anyway. Most likely in the
early or mid 1930s, his view is to the northeast along the Galveston, Harrisburg
& San Antonio (GH&SA) Railway in central El Paso where four railroads
intersected. Another Barriger photo (below) shows Tower 47 and was likely taken a few years
later, perhaps the late 1930s or early 1940s. The identity of Tower 47 is
confirmed by the nearby "Consumers Ice & Fuel Co." building to the right, a
business that now operates as "Reddy-Ice" in El Paso. This view is looking south
on the El Paso & Northeastern with the El Paso & Southwestern crossing in the immediate
foreground, and the boxcars in the distance (to the left of the tower) probably
on the GH&SA tracks behind the tower. (John W Barriger III National Railroad
Library)
Rails arrived in El Paso in May, 1881 as Southern
Pacific (SP) built eastward from California, part of a southern
transcontinental route, though not as originally envisioned. An 1871 Act of Congress
awarded a Federal railroad charter to the Texas & Pacific (T&P) Railway and gave
them the right to build from Marshall, Texas to San Diego, California. The Act
also authorized SP to connect with the T&P at Yuma, Arizona. When SP reached
Yuma in 1877, the T&P was nowhere to be found. It had built no farther west than
Fort Worth, and was still trying to arrange financial backing to continue
construction across the vast and sparsely populated frontier to San Diego. Over
T&P's objections, SP took advantage and continued
east past Yuma using the surveyed T&P route to carry its rails all the way to El Paso.
In 1878, SP Chairman Collis Huntington initiated discussions with
Thomas Peirce (with the unusual ei spelling), head of the Galveston,
Harrisburg & San Antonio (GH&SA) Railway. Huntington had arranged
construction permission from the Arizona and New Mexico territorial governments
and knew that SP would reach El Paso in two or three years. It was time to plan
a route across Texas. The GH&SA had finished building to San
Antonio from Houston in 1877 and Huntington wanted Peirce to extend this line westward to
meet SP in El Paso.
Huntington's real objective was to create a transcontinental route closer to
both Mexico and Gulf of Mexico ports (thus,
substantially south of T&P's congressionally sanctioned route) using San Antonio, Houston and New Orleans as waypoints.
Huntington would need to build 800 miles across Texas, but he did not have a
state charter to do so (and getting one from the Texas
legislature would take time and
was fraught with political peril.) Instead, Huntington proposed to finance the GH&SA's extension to El Paso
knowing that SP would then be positioned to
acquire the GH&SA and its route across Texas. By the summer of 1880, an
agreement was in place and SP survey teams were in Texas mapping the route
between El Paso and San Antonio.
Since the GH&SA did not have the
resources to build the entire route on Huntington's ambitious timetable, Peirce contracted with SP's Southern Development Co. to
manage construction east from El Paso, which commenced in June, 1881. The
existing GH&SA team managed construction west from San Antonio which began about
the same time. Huntington was in a hurry, and for good reason. The T&P had
resumed construction west of Fort Worth and had reached Big Spring, about 350
miles from El Paso. At the time, the T&P was controlled by rail baron Jay Gould.
Gould understood that because of Huntington's arrangement with the GH&SA, SP's tracks would be well east of El Paso by the time T&P's
construction reached the vicinity. A deal was struck; Huntington gave the T&P
rights on the GH&SA tracks into El Paso in exchange for Gould giving SP any rights or franchises
T&P held west of El Paso and agreeing not
to extend the T&P beyond El Paso. The meeting point for the two railroads
became the new town of Sierra Blanca, 91 rail miles from El Paso. SP
construction crews reached Sierra Blanca on December 6, 1881 (some sources say
November 25, 1881) and the T&P rails arrived on December 16, 1881. SP continued
building east, reaching Marfa in January and Sanderson in May. The SP and GH&SA
construction teams finally met at the Pecos River on January 12, 1883 where
Huntington and Peirce drove a silver spike signifying completion the major part of SP's southern transcontinental
route. SP then leased the GH&SA for several years and ultimately acquired it.
About the time SP's construction began east from El Paso, the town's second
railroad, the Rio Grande & El Paso Railroad, was completing 20 miles of track
between El Paso and the New Mexico/Texas border. This line was to become part of
an Atchison, Topeka & Santa
Fe line between El Paso and Albuquerque, a line that continues in service today,
now owned by successor Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). Despite extensive
tracks in El Paso, Santa Fe was not involved with Tower 47 nor any of
El Paso's other three
interlocking towers.
While Santa Fe's route to Albuquerque went
northwest from El Paso, other investors were seeking ways to build northeast
from El Paso toward Kansas City and Chicago. A series of attempts to do so failed
to make much progress until the El Paso & Northeastern (EP&NE) Railroad was
founded by Charles Eddy. Eddy's stated objective was to build to coal fields in
eastern New Mexico, 160 miles north of El Paso, but his larger vision was a
connection to the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad in northeastern New
Mexico. The EP&NE reached the coal fields near Carrizozo in 1899, and an additional 128
miles was built to Santa Rosa in 1902 where a connection with the Rock Island was made,
completing a route between Chicago and El Paso. On November 2, 1902, Rock Island
and SP collaborated to initiate the Golden State Limited passenger
train service between Chicago and Los Angeles via El Paso and the EP&NE.
Coal was also a motivating factor for the last railroad to reach El Paso. The
investment firm Phelps Dodge had acquired interests in copper mining in Arizona,
an enterprise that required coal to produce coke as a fuel for smelting. Charles
Eddy convinced Phelps Dodge that there was a source of higher grade coal for
coking near Dawson, New Mexico to which his EP&NE was already building tracks. Phelps
Dodge proceeded to buy coal mines near Dawson and began planning a rail route
to reach them from Arizona. Renaming their existing Arizona & South Eastern
Railway as the El Paso &
Southwestern (EP&SW), Phelps Dodge built a new line east
from Douglas, Arizona. It reached El Paso in 1903 where it connected with the
EP&NE. In 1905, the EP&NE became a
leased subsidiary of the EP&SW.
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Left: This image from
the index of the 1908 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of El Paso has been
annotated to show the rail junction where Tower 47 was located among the main freight yards,
about a mile and a half northeast of El Paso's downtown Union Depot
passenger station. It was authorized for operation on July 11, 1904 by
the Railroad Commission of Texas (RCT) with participating railroads
being the GH&SA, the T&P and the EP&NE. By 1916, the interlocker
function count had increased from 25 to 31 functions. Another increase
to 60 functions is noted in the report for 1923. By 1928, ten additional
functions had been added, bringing the total to 70.
The EP&SW operated tracks past the tower and had acquired the
EP&NE in 1905, but it was
not listed by RCT as part of
the Tower 47 interlocker until 1927. Although T&P shared the GH&SA line into
town from the east, it had its own yard south of Tower 47 along with its
own connecting tracks and industry spurs. Santa Fe's tracks were mostly well
south of Tower 47, off the bottom of the map near the Rio Grande.
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When copper mining took a severe downturn in the early
1920s, Phelps Dodge leased the EP&SW tracks to SP; the lease did not include the EP&NE.
The EP&SW main line became SP's "South Line" between El Paso and Tucson. SP was
able to acquire the EP&NE in the late 1930s, and in 1955, it acquired all
remaining components of the EP&SW. In 1959, SP began abandonment proceedings for
various track segments including the South Line. In the mid-1990s, SP was acquired by
Union Pacific (UP) which continues extensive operations through El Paso to the
east, west and north.
Email from Bob Phillips,
November 12, 2001
"Tower 47 in El Paso is...occupied by only the
Signal Dept. as they still have signal
equipment in the bottom floor of it. The tower was still occupied
with a control operator (towerman), yardmaster, lead carman, and roundhouse
foreman until November, 1997 when they were all moved into the
yard office building, known as the line desk. The tower has been
vacant of these employees since then. There is still a "control
operator" at El Paso that controls everything that the Tower
47 operator and Tower 196 operator used to control. They are currently
located in the new yard office northeast of the roundhouse that
UP opened up approximately a year or so ago."
Above: Tower 47 photos by Ernie
Leggett, 2006. Below: The
location of Tower 47's brick building is annotated on this Google Map of El
Paso. It was still standing as of March, 2013, but it was removed sometime
thereafter and was definitely gone by 2017. A white equipment cabinet (visible
above left) remains in place.
Although the main refrigeration building has been rebuilt, the
Consumers Ice & Fuel Co. facility captured by Barriger in his photo of Tower 47 (above,
John W Barriger III National Railroad Library)
still stands (below, Google
Street View, Feb. 2020 -- this is the Reddy Ice facility at bottom center of the
above map.) Because the location of the Tower 47 brick structure is precisely known, the distance between
the two buildings can be measured; it is ~ 330 yds., just shy of three football
fields including end zones. The image above certainly gives the appearance that
the two structures are closer than three football fields, but without knowing
the details of Barriger's camera, it would be difficult to calculate the
distance with any accuracy.
Below: Another Barriger
photo shows both Tower 47 and the Consumers Ice & Fuel building at roughly
similar distances. Again, the horizontal distance between them appears to be closer than three
football fields. If the height of the peaked roof of Tower 47 is roughly 30 ft.
(10 yds.), and assuming both buildings are more or less equally far from
Barriger, the distance between them can be crudely estimated as ~ 60 or 70 yds.
Even if this estimate was in error by a factor of two, it would still be less
than half of the measured distance for the brick tower. It seems
plausible that the new brick structure was built north and east of the wooden
structure, perhaps to allow the tower to maintain interlocker operations during the brick
building's construction. (John W Barriger
III National Railroad Library) 
Below:
This Barriger photo shows Tower 47 beyond the Cotton St. grade crossing in the
foreground (guarded by a crossing control tower at right.)
Cotton is now an overpass that appears to track the original roadway alignment.
The
distance from the overpass to the former location of the brick Tower 47 using a
line parallel to the main tracks (a necessary caveat since Cotton is not
perpendicular to the tracks) is about 140 yards. Does Tower 47 in this photo
appear to be 140 yards beyond the grade crossing? It's difficult to say, but
it's reasonable to suggest that it looks closer than that. The wooden
tower being closer (more westerly) to Cotton would be consistent with the idea
that the brick tower was east and north of the original tower. (John W Barriger
III National Railroad Library)
Above: A map in the
1954 "re-print" (but incorporating numerous updates) of the 1908 Sanborn Fire
Insurance map set of El Paso shows a structure (along the right edge of the map)
approximately where the brick Tower 47 was located.
Unfortunately (and despite magnification), the description of the structure is illegible. The only original Sanborn Map Sets of El Paso that
might might show the location of Tower 47 are dated 1905 and 1908, but neither
has a map that covers the area where the tower was located. The map above also
shows a 4-story "Switch Tower" along the left edge of the image, undoubtedly the
same yard tower seen in the image below,
taken in 1960 with the Cotton overpass in the background. (courtesy Cornell University
Library.)
Above and Below: The brick
Tower 47 was most likely built sometime in the 1950s. These images of it were
captured from the Cotton overpass in March, 1960 by Ernest Hoppock. (Special
Collections, University of Texas El Paso)
