Historic Tower 55 is one of Fort Worth's most important and enduring historic structures, Tower 55. It is located a few hundred feet southwest of Fort Worth's Downtown Mixmaster, and controls traffic flow between Union Pacific, Burlington Northern, Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads.
Its functions was moved to the Regional Dispatching Center on the Second Floor of the Crest Tower Building at Centennial Yard in 1995.
The tower recently underwent a complete renovationnin 1994, which included new heating and air conditioning systems, a new roof, windows, offices and computer equipment for the yardmaster and manager of train operation.
A traffic control system or "interlocking plant" has been at the location of Historic Tower 55 probably as long as our beloved Tarrant County Courthouse which was built in 1897.
The first tower, which was located on the northwest corner of the crossing of the tracks, was comissioned by the Texas Railroad Commission on August 9, 1904. It, like the present tower, circa 1930, was "electrically operated."
There is strong evidence that a "mechanical" plant was in operation there before that time. The earlier plants controlled traffic between the T&P, MKT, H&TC and GC&SF railroads.
Whether they realize it or not, almost everyone in the North Texas area has seen our Historic Tower 55. Everyone with any curiosity and imagination who drives south on I-35W or east on I-30 through Fort Worth's Downtown Mixmaster has wondered, "What is that strange odd-shaped building with the funny roof over there by the railroad tracks? ... It must have something to do with the trains."
Tower 55 is in the middle of a magical spot in the history of Fort Worth and the history of Texas commerce. It marks of the intersection of ancient migratory trails of the Indians and the buffalo, later called the Chisholm Trail and the Emigrant Trail.
For 116 years, it has been the main crossing point for all the great railroads in the Southwest United States.
It is at the point where north-south highways crossed old U.S. Highway 80 and where today's Interstates 35W and 30 interchange with a half a dozen other freeways.
In earlier days of air travel, our country's air traffic control system consisted of "airways." Main north-south airways crossed an east-west airway in Fort Worth.
As a boy in the 1940s, I remember riding with my father, an airways inspector for the predecessor of today's FAA, down old US 80, listening to an aircraft radio installed in his truck. We could hear the Morse Codes for "A" (dot-dash) and "N" (dash- dot) emitted by the old-time radio beacons that told pilots when they deviated too far to the right or left of the airway.
If Fort Worth had not existed already when the railroads came through here, this spot would probably have been chosen for their intersection anyway, because of the lay of the land, and Fort Worth (or a city with some other name) would have built up around it.
On July 19, 1876, Texas and Pacific's engine Number 20 with Engineer Kelly at the throttle, steamed up to a spot just east of where Historic Tower 55 stands today. The Fort Worth Democrat's headline read, "The Panther Screamed!"
The headline was an answer to an earlier Dallas Morning News tongue-in-cheek report that a "panther was seen sleeping in the street of Fort Worth," bragging that they had a railroad and Fort Worth didn't. (Dallas and Fort Worth were serious rivals even in frontier days.)
The railroad's progress had been halted at Eagle Ford, four miles west of Dallas, by the "Financial Panic of 1873." In desperation in 1875, Fort Worth civic leaders Jesse Zane-Cetti, John Peter Smith, K.M. VanZant, and others formed the Tarrant County Construction Company and with the help of all the citizens in the community, completed the roadbed to Fort Worth.