Harris interlocking machine

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Harris shared duties with State tower, with each tower controlling one end of the once-busy Harrisburg passenger station. In addition to the west end of the passenger station, Harris also controlled trackage that led to the east end of the yard and locomotive facilities, the Columbia Branch and the connection to the Reading Company. This was once a multiple-man tower, with probably a Train Director, an Assistant Train Director, a "goat" (Assistant to the Train Director -- note the subtle difference in title) and two levermen. (The desk has provisions for three people.)

Harris machine, before things really got bad. When I took these photos (time exposures during a last trick assignment -- you can't see me walking and throwing levers in it :-) I had no idea whatsoever that the C&S Department was going to start paingint out tracks and removing large portions of the diagram in the following weeks! Call this a very lucky shot...

Right side of the model board. Tracks at the top right are the Pittsburgh Line single track and controlled siding; tracks at the bottom are No. 11 and No. 12 Running tracks into the yard. I did make a pass through here -- take note of 70 signal lever in two positions.

Left side of the model board. Track at the extreme lower left corner is the RDG connection; the Columbia Branch (um, Royalton Branch for the CR guys) is above it. Tracks above are the station tracks; Nos. 4, 7 and 8 tracks are through tracks (No. 6 track was later extended; C&S tried their best to reuse the old levers on the machine when hooking up the switch and signals in order to maintain all the mechanical interlocking.) The empty space in the middle is where GG1s would lay over; with engine changes taking place in Philadelphia, those tracks (No. 36 and No. 37?) became redundant and were removed. The "thing" jumping out in the foreground is probably the gooseneck for one of the desk lamps; I didn't notice it until I started playing around with the scanned image -- and it took me a while to figure out just what it was!

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