Chicago's historic Brighton Junction. ( Gone / rebuilt and modernized.) Chicago Illinois USA. October 2006.

I took this photo on an overcast Autum morning, back in October of 2006. This is a photo of Chicago's Brighton Junction, wich was located up on an embankment just west of the intersection of South Archer and Western Avenues. Brighton Junction, was an old steam era manual railroad crosstrack junction with manually operated mechanical Semaphore signals and a dispatch operator on duty controlling train traffic at the crossreacks. It was long outdated technologicaly, and was in it's last Autum of operation a manually controlled railroad junction. In early July of 2007, the Canadian National Railroad closed this junction, took the shanty out of service, rebuilt the crosstracks and replaced the old Swmaphore signals with modern block signals. Brighton Junction used to be a place where modern double stack container trains, met old steam era signaling and operating procedures. All trains had to stop at the crosstracks. Today it is 100% automated with Satelite communications.