10/07/2026
This is not Tower 3, but a glimpse into what it would’ve been used for back in the day. Again, this is NOT Tower 3. This is an AI photo. Feel free to come by the museum when we’re open and get a tour of the inside of the REAL Tower 3!
Most people drive through Flatonia without noticing the little wooden building beside the tracks. For most of a century, the person sitting upstairs in that building decided which train in Texas went first. 🚂
Where two railroads crossed at grade, somebody had to control the diamond, because a mistake there was not a delay, it was a collision. Texas assigned numbers to those interlocking towers, and the one at Flatonia got number three. Inside, an operator worked a frame of heavy levers and wrote in a train register, lining up the signals so that one road got the crossing and the other got a red arm and a long wait. It was a job of total attention for hours at a time, then thirty seconds of real consequence, then more waiting.
The towers went away slowly, replaced by dispatchers at consoles a hundred miles off. Most were torn down for the lumber. Flatonia's survived, and the town turned the ground around it into a little rail park where you can stand at the diamond and look up at the windows. You can still see where the lever frame sat and how small the room was for the amount of weight the work carried.
There are thousands of structures like that one scattered across Texas, standing there looking like nothing, holding a job description nobody remembers.
