Gatekeeper house

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Station keeper's house 159 on the Gotthard Railway Ceneri pass route, Switzerland (approx. 1976)World icon

As a rule, station guards' houses were built at level crossings of railways and roads or at block points , switches and junction points so that the responsible railway staff, colloquially called station guards , could live right next to their workplaces. Other guard houses, for example on the Gotthard line , were built for railway attendants or line guards, whose job it was to check the section of the line to the next station guard's house on a daily basis and to carry out certain track maintenance work.

With the increasing density of railway operations , it became necessary to permanently staff important positions on the railway side in order to carry out control and reporting tasks , to carry out manual controls , to operate mechanical barriers , signals and points. For this reason, railroad attendant's houses were built based on the model of the Chausseehaus as an official residence for the railroad attendant, in rather rare cases also with an office. Already in the early days of the railway z. B. at the Bavarian Eastern Railway Company railway guard houses (for married guards) and guard houses (for single guards). One of the tasks of the station attendant was to close the barriers, to set the points in train stations and to light lanterns for lighting purposes and in signals and to extinguish them after daybreak.

Today barriers, signals and switches are usually remotely controlled from an interlocking, so that service at the station keeper's house is a thing of the past. Some of these houses have become single-family or weekend homes through sale in private hands .

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Commons : Gatekeeper Houses  - Collection of images, videos and audio files