Station: Carleton Tower, MI

Carleton, Michigan interlocking in northeast Monroe County. This is the crossing of the N-S Chessie System and the E-W Detroit, Toledo & Ironton. Above, the tower still stands, unoccupied, as of 2002. [Nathan Nietering photo.] Below, the model board in the tower. Model boards showed the positions of trains, switches and signals. [Charlie Whipp photo]

Carleton tower was staffed by the Pere Marquette, and later the C&O and CSX. The tower had a "pistol grip" interlocker which protected the crossing of the PM/PRR and the DT&I. The telegraph call for Carleton was "CN". [CW]

Information posted by Doug Hefty on 5/12/05: "When I worked at Carleton Tower in the early 1970's the former PRR trackage (then Penn Central) northeast of Carelton was called the Lincoln Branch and still dispatched with train orders between Carleton and Penford. We used to copy the running orders for Northward trains. The operation of trains was sometimes hit and miss; some days they might run 3 or 4 trains and then nothing for a few days. For some reason, southbound trains were few and far between. There was a passing siding on the PC at Carleton; the south end was a power switch controlled from the tower; the north switch was hand throw by the train crew. This siding was almost continually blocked with cars. Quite often at night an engine would come down from Penford to switch Guardian Glass (known as "Ash") just north of Carleton and also a scrap yard (known as "Lurmet") further north. Occasionally they would stop a northbound to switch the glass plant with the rear of the train still hanging out in the Carleton interlocking tying up No. 1 track on the C&O and delaying DT&I movements. Of course the PC would do this without permission! Once they even blocked Monroe St and people coming out of the hotel tavern started pulling pins. I had to call the police! The days of the PRR "Red Arrow" were before my time on the railroad.

Doug Hefty, a C&O operator in the 1970's writes on 12/18/2005: At Carleton the operator controlled the highway flashers by a toggle switch. On the DT&I side, there were yellow warning lights that told you when to turn the flashers on. On the C&O side, a buzzer would go off when the train passed the home signals, but by then the trains were really too close to the crossing, so you had to "eyeball" it. For southbound C&O trains at night, we used a very "sophisticated" system: There was a telegraph pole just north of the tower. The headlight from a southbound train would case a shadow of the pole on the tower window. When the leading edge of the shadow reached the middle of the window, you turned on the flashers. I was told that at Carleton, we got an additional 2 cents per hour for operating the highway flashers!

I worked the 3rd trick at Carleton from 1971 until fall 1974. When I worked there, we still had the DT&I yard that included the siding and 3 tracks. Every night the DT&I would bring over a big slug of cars (sometimes up to 100). Then the C&O 1155 pm switcher out of Monroe would come and switch the yard. He'd line up the stuff for Plymouth north and put on the North Pass, put Grand Rapids stuff on the South Pass and Detroit stuff on the team track all for through trains to pick up. Then he'd gather up all the Wayne cars and head that way. Sometimes they had a Wayne job come down and get their cars. I know the yard is gone as is the wye. The train order signal was almost perpetual "yellow" north. Carleton at that time had a variety of signal types: The C&O north was a 3-headed tri-light. The C&O south was a tri-light with vertical lights. The DT&I south was a searchlight and the DT&I north was a color-position light. On the Penn Central side, they had the traditional yellow position light. The C&O train order signal was standard with blades. The DT&I train order light was a flashing type that looked like a traffic light. The PC was a yellow metal flag that you hung out the window (low budget, I guess). The first night I worked there by myself in 1971, I had 28 trains in 8 hours!