These are notes I am writing to help me learn our industrial history. They are my best understanding, but that does not mean they are a correct understanding.
Rick Giles posted five tower photos with the comment:
Between 1955 and 1969 I lived and grew up in Springfield, Ohio, a town of about 73,000 people at the time. Springfield had four railroads, the Big Four(NYC), the Pennsylvania, the Detroit, Toledo, and Ironton(D,T,& I) and the Erie. The Big Four was by far the major player in town, followed by the DT&I, then the PRR, and finally the Erie. Both the Big Four and the DT&I ran through town and had significant facilites their including yards, and engine servicing facilities. The PRR served Springfield by way of a branchline from Xenia, Ohio and had a small passenger depot(until passenger service was discontinued sometime in the 1950s) and a two track freight house. The Erie's Dayton branch from Marion cut diagonally across the northwest quadrant just outside Springfield city limits. Springfield had five towers in or near the city. Starting from east to west in the attached photos were Carney(call letters AK), East St. (YK), Cold Springs(CS) all on the Big Four. North of town on the Big Four was Glen Echo(CH) and at the crossing of the Erie and the DT&I northwest of town was Maitland(NY).
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Looking at a 2005 SPV railroad map, most of this trackage still exists. Unfortunately, some of Rick's tower names are not on that map. So I'm not going to annotate a map with the tower locations. But I will note that the main east/west Big Four route is NS. Most of the Big Four branch lines, the DT&I and the southwest segment of the Erie are now Indiana & Ohio Central Railroad (IOCR) or Indiana & Ohio Railway (IORY), both subsidiaries of RailAmerica. The northeast segment of Erie and the PRR line were abandoned by Conrail. Since the SPV map is a copyrighted book, I include an old topo map to show the railroads.
Rick Giles posted some details about Glen Echo including these water towers. The tall one would be the one used to fill the tenders. The two on the ground must have been storage towers. The pump house in the middle probably pumped from a well into the storage tanks. Then it would pump water from the storage tanks to the train tower to keep it full. The flow from the well must have been slow so the well pump needed to periodically pump 24 hours a day. But the arrival of trains may have been bunched to create a big demand during a small interval of time. The auxiliary storage tanks would accommodate the surge in demand.
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