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An effort is underway to restore and relocate the old signal tower at Kingston Station.

An effort is underway to restore and relocate the old signal tower at Kingston Station.

KINGSTON, R.I. — A group of preservation enthusiasts is looking to restore an old, dilapidated and nearly collapsed railroad signal tower near the Kingston Train Station. They need your help.

According to Frank Heppner, who is active in Friends of Kingston Station and led efforts to restore that historic building, the nearby signal tower should also get a similar renovation. Volunteers are needed for a new committee just beginning the project, he said.

“Our vision is to restore the thing and move it closer to the station, the other side of the overpass” and make it part visitors center and part museum for tourists coming to the Amtrak station for trains coming to South County, he said.

This group is trying to prevent the effects of modernity from stealing a relic of the past that could be put to new and different uses. The falling apart small two-story building is covered with vines of weeds crawling up its gray rotting square side. A portion of a small roof is already bowing over in decay.

It is not far from arched steel girders over the tracks and sparkling with their silver sturdiness. They hold lights and other computerized technical switches whose service was once done by people upstairs in the nearby tower.

These warnings to stop trains or intervene to make necessary track changes for on coming locomotives are now transmitted electronically through backroom computers, leading to the demise of most local control signal boxes.

Signalmen next to the track are no longer needed to serve as the eyes and ears of the signaling system. Track circuits transmit train locations to distant control centers and data links allow direct manipulation of the points and signals.

So why not let this tower fade into history with the people who once stood in them?

“There are multiple reasons,” Heppner said. “It’s a historic building, not many of them left in the U.S., and if saved, it will be useful for the community as both a preserved part of history and possible use around the station area where we have an old building with modern use.”

Heppner estimates that the cost could be well over $1 million. The building is owned by the State of Rhode Island. State permission would be needed to have the work done and the building moved, according to the state.

In addition to needing a new roof, the building’s windows are blown out, window frames are boarded up, graffiti is sprayed on the building’s cracked and gray-flaking paint, there are holes in floors, boards are hanging loose and doors to the inside have been pried open.

Rebellious teens have long hid there for moments of independence while risking the inoperable stairs to the second story that are broken and sagging.

“Two independent contractors who specialize in the restoration of historical buildings say the tower can be moved, restored, and re-purposed,” Heppner said.

“We have some preliminary discussions with the state and it is in favor of it so long as it doesn’t cost the state any money,” he said. Officials for the state Department of Transportation confirmed that private money would be needed.

To avoid that part which could bring the project to a halt, the group of 10 so far plans to seek federal and state historic preservation grants, he said. However, first needed is a detailed overall engineering and cost assessment for the complete work that would be included in any request for a grant.

Heppner said that the group is seeking volunteers to help with researching and writing the grant proposals after the assessment is done.

Towers came in an era when trains were the means for rapid and mass transportation in regions or around the country. Originally, all signaling was done by mechanical means requiring the signal towers for the watchman.

Points and signals were operated by using individual levers or handles, requiring the signalman to walk between the various pieces of equipment to set them in the required position for each train that passed.

Before long, it was realized that control should be concentrated in one building, which came to be known as a signal box.

As the technology of electric relay logic was developed, it no longer became necessary for signalmen to operate control devices with any sort of mechanical logic at all.

This preservation would accompany the work done on the 1875 wood-frame Kingston Railroad Station. It still stands in its original location on an almost flat site on the east side of the Northeast Corridor Amtrak railway line in the village of West Kingston.

Just a few hundred yards away and by the now Route 138 overpass is this lonely tower separated from the station as change occurred all around it in the last 92 years.

“We’re going to have to get something done this year, or something will happen. It is collapsing, falling apart and needs to be fixed,” Heppner said.

Write to Bill Seymour, freelance writer covering news and feature stories, at independent.southcountylife@gmail.com.

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