On May 28, 2017...smoke rose near downtown Los Angeles as massive flames gutted a historic structure - the Redondo Junction interlocking tower. Built in 1906, the tower oversaw the passage of hundreds of thousands of trains during its career seeing both the rise and fall of the Santa Fe Railway and Southern Pacific Railroad. During its final years of operation, ending in 2001, the tower continued to serve the BNSF Railway and Union Pacific Railroad as new advancements like the Alameda Corridor's 'trench' and Redondo Flyover took shape around it. Boarded up, the tower seemed to always have an uncertain future after its service to the Class I's - ranging from being move to a nearby museum to being cosmetically restored where it stood. As plan after plan fell through to save the tower, it remained in its place...with the local homeless community taking fancy to it and moving in to both levels of it. "It was only a matter of time," maintenance crews at the local Amtrak yard told me the afternoon I took this picture, looking over at the charred structure...which today (July 2017) no longer stands. The remains of the tower, pictured here with a northbound Amtrak train passing in the background just two days after the structure burned, were bulldozed and thrown into a dumpster.
