Foreign Interlockings

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Harry,

I spent considerable time in the early 1960s at the Montview "tower" ( actually a small, one story, two room wooden building with no running water) that stood on the Southern main where the north leg of the double wye connecting N&W with Southern connected to the Southern main. Your description is right on target.  They double wye was used by the Southern/ N&W passenger trains (17/18, 41/42, 45/46 at that time) and  for the transfer of freight cars between Kinney and Montview yards.  Now that I think back on operations at Montview, I do not recall any communication between the Montview operator with N&W dispatchers or operators when trains went into or came out of the wye. The Montview operator did manually align the switch on the Southern main for these movements and also manually controlled the crossover just north of Montview that permitted northbound trains to move from the Southern southbound main which they entered coming off the wye to the Southern northbound main and on two miles or so to Kemper Street station.

Montview was an "Armstrong" operated switch and signal control point. As a teenager I was sometimes challenged to "throw the lever" because it took considerable mass to operate some of the switches.

I once rode the Southern "weed killer" train when spraying in this area. It sprayed to the mid- point of the double wye and stopped, leaving the rest for N&W to take care of.


Today, the  Amtrak Northeast Regional Service to Lynchburg is turned on this same wye for return to Washington the next morning. I assume that when this service is extended to Roanoke next year the double wye will return to its role of fifty years and more ago of providing transfer between the former Southern and N&W mains.

Montview "tower" was taken out in the late 1960s. There is a picture of Montview "tower" on the back cover of The Southern Railway Handbook by Aubrey Wiley and Conley Wallace.


   Ray Smoot

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 30, 2016, at 1:06 PM, NW Mailing List via NW-Mailing-List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org<mailto:nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>> wrote:



This may be a "stretch", but consider Montview on the Southern
at Lynchburg.  In 1934, this connection between the N&W and
Southern was operated as an "absolute block".  Part of the
connection was owned by N&W and part by Southern. Special
Instructions in the Norfolk Div. time table stated that trains
(Nos. 17-18, 41-42 and others) would retain their numbers and
their class on the connecting track.  So the Southern operators
had to signal N&W crews to proceed into (and off of) Southern
ownership.  The track chart shows that N&W also owned one of
the interchange tracks paralleling the Southern main line.
                                           Harry Bundy

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