The first Centralized Traffic Control installation was developed by the General Railway Signaling company in 1927 for the New York Central in Ohio. 1927 also saw the first motion picture "talkie", the Jazz Singer with Al Jolson. It looks like Union Switch and Signal only has enough time to respond to one of these new technologies because I found an early 1930's SILENT film released by US&S promoting the advantages of a brand new CTC project on the Burlington Route between Denver and Akron, Colorado. The film is 30 minutes long and goes into great detail about how the new technology works and the time is saved over manual traffic control (aka Train Order) systems.
Remember that CTC dispatching was pretty advanced for the 1950's. This was 20 years before that and a dispatcher's console with an illuminated real time model board must have been able to absolutely blow people's minds.
A blog devoted to explaining the ins and outs of North American railroad signaling, past, present and future. This blog seeks to preserve through photo documentation the great diversity and technical ingenuity of 20th century signaling and interlocking hardware and technology. Related topics cover interlocking towers and railroad communications infrastructure.
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Great video. Some CB&Q fans might not even know about this.
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