Interlocking - History

History

Railway interlocking is of British origin, where numerous patents were granted. In June 1856, John Saxby received the first patent for interlocking switches and signals. In 1868, Saxby (of Saxby & Farmer) was awarded a patent for what is known today in North America as “preliminary latch locking”. Preliminary latch locking became so successful that by 1873, 13,000 mechanical locking levers were employed on the London and North Western Railway alone.

The first experiment with mechanical interlocking in the United States took place in 1875 by J. M. Toucey and William Buchanan at Spuyten Duyvil Junction in New York on the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad (NYC&HRR). At the time, Toucey was General Superintendent and Buchanan was Superintendent of Machinery on the NYC&HRR. Toucey and Buchanan formed the Toucey and Buchanan Interlocking Switch and Signal Company in Harrisburgh, Pennsylvania in 1878. The first important installations of their mechanism were on the switches and signals of the Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company and the New York Elevated Railroad Company in 1877-78. Compared to Saxby's design, Toucey and Buchanans' interlocking mechanism was more cumbersome and less sophisticated, so was not implemented very widely. Union Switch and Signal bought their company in 1882.

As technology advanced that served to augment the muscle strength of human beings the railway signaling industry looked to incorporate these new technologies into interlockings to increase the speed of route setting, the number of appliances controlled from a single point and to expand the distance that those same appliances could be operated from the point of control. The challenge facing the signal industry was achieving the same level of safety and reliability that was inherent to purely mechanical systems. An experimental hydro-pneumatic interlocking was installed at the Bound Brook, New Jersey junction of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Lehigh Valley Railroad in 1884. By 1891, there were 18 hydro-pneumatic plants, on six railroads, operating a total of 482 levers. The installations worked, but there were serious defects in the design, and little saving of labour was achieved.

The inventors of the hydro-pneumatic system moved forward to an electro-pneumatic system in 1891 and this system, best identified with the Union Switch & Signal Company, was first installed on the Chicago and Northern Pacific Railroad at its drawbridge across the Chicago River. By 1900, 54 electro-pneumatic interlocking plants, controlling a total of 1,864 interlocking levers, were in use on 13 North American railroads and this type system would remain one of two viable competing systems into the future, although it did have the disadvantage of needing extra single-use equipment and requiring high maintenance.

Interlockings using electric motors for moving switches and signals became viable in 1894, when Siemens in Austria installed the first such interlocking at Prerov (now in the Czech Republic). Another interlocking of this type was installed in Berlin Westend in 1896. In North America, the first installation of an interlocking plant using electric switch machines was at Eau Claire, Wisconsin on the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railway in 1901, by General Railway Signal Company (now a unit of Alstom, headquartered in Levallois-Perret, near Paris). By 1913, this type system had been installed on 83 railroads in 35 US States and Canadian Provinces, in 440 interlocking plants using 21,370 levers.