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STANDING 2026 · retired; dispatching from Jacksonville
The town's railroad plant keeps one building the whole county can see: the ex-B&O interlocking tower at the Walkerton diamonds — KN Tower — still stands in the triangle where the Nickel Plate line and the Kankakee Belt crossed the B&O. It is a brick tower that originally rose three floors; its top floor was destroyed by fire, and the B&O cut the tower off at that line and kept the limestone plinth as a cap, which is why the standing building wears a stone hat where its third story should be. The tower is retired and inactive — the Garrett Subdivision is dispatched from Jacksonville — but it stands, and the December 2004 photographic record of the crossings shows the junction it governed while the Kankakee Belt's diamond was still set in the north–south road. Conrail removed the Belt's diamonds; the surviving crossing of the two steam roads now works on OWLS diamonds — one-level-wheel-set castings that let the lesser line cross the main line's rail without a gap in it — the modern, unstaffed answer to the tower's levers.
Sources:
- The trainorders.com photographic essay, "KN Tower, Walkerton, Indiana," 22 April 2020 — the tower's fabric, the fire and the cut-down, its retired state, the diamond history, first-hand photographic strength.
- The December 2004 photographic record of the Walkerton crossings (monon.org) — the Kankakee Belt diamond still set in the north–south road at that date.