I once had the opportunity to tour a US railroad switch tower, likely dating to the 1930s if not before. As with much other industrial architecture, something most people may not realise is the extent to which the form of the structure is dictated by not only human requirements (elevated position to have an overview of the yard) but the technical mechanism itself.

The upper portion of the tower is dominated not only by the observation windows, but by a vast number of physical rods which control individual sets of points (track switches). The levers don't move the rails directly, but they do directly move the electro-mechanical activators in the tower base, from which rods or cables (I believe it's rods, I'm not positive however) make a continuous physical connection to each controlled set of points. That is, there is not a separate actuator at the points themselves.

(More modern switching systems, or even other older ones, may well have this. The tower I observed most certainly did not.)

I've also had an interest for some years in how the artefacts of control influence the language of control. We speak of the reins or levers of power in most European languages, reflecting older sources or projections of power; modern terms seem to have been slower to be adopted though some ("dynamo" and "engine") are extant. I've long suspected that the Chinese, with a millennia-long history of hydrologic civil engineering projects might have a language of power which borrows from water control structures (dams, gates, levees, bridges, etc.). Some time afterward I realised that Latin certainly does, and retains at least one descriptor in pontifex maximus, that is, "bridge builder in chief*, first applied to Rome's emperors, now its Pope. And I've very recently learnt that Vietnamese language and culture have many words with shared roots in water, including the word for "mother".