ATTLEBORO - For the past two decades, the Attleboro signal station has set empty and decaying, overlooking the Amtrak and MBTA main railroad line near the city common.

Soon, the two-story wooden structure, which once served as a nerve center for overseeing the safety of thousands of trains and millions of commuters traveling between Boston and Providence, may be coming down.

The 1908 vintage Attleboro station, referred to as an interlocking tower in the railroad industry, once housed towermen who aligned railroad switches for freight and passenger trains and handed up orders to passing engineers and their crews.

Amtrak project engineer James Garden said the tower is one of several between Attleboro and Westerly, R.I., that the railroad wants to demolish for safety reasons.

The nationwide passenger railroad has not set a specific date for the demolition and is required to follow provisions outlined under the National Historic Preservation Act before it can level the abandoned structures. Signal stations once served an irreplaceable function on the railroad to ensure that trains were placed on the right tracks to route them to their proper destinations and to prevent collisions that could result from switching errors.

Switch controllers in the towers received instructions by telegraph or telephone from a central dispatcher who told them how and when to align a switch.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, such manned towers began giving way to centralized traffic control complexes that use computers and electronics to monitor rail traffic and remotely control switches, said Wayne Drummond, president of the New Haven Railroad Historical and Technical Society.

Besides the Attleboro tower, similar buildings in Hartford and Groton, Conn., and Westerly, Pawtucket and Central Falls, R.I., are also being proposed for demolition.

Although towermen mainly executed instructions given them by a central dispatcher, those who worked in the towers held awesome responsibility not only for keeping trains on time, but for the safety of their crews and passengers. Busy towers were manned 24 hours, seven days a week.

"There were errors out there, but they were very few," Drummond said. "When you consider the vast amount of traffic they controlled, they did a great job."

During the early decades of the 20th century, most intercity traffic moved by rail, Drummond said, placing an incredibly high value on reliability and safety. During World War II, the Attleboro tower's responsiblities multiplied with a surge in military train movements between Taunton's vast Camp Myles Standish and the port of Boston.

Scheduled railroad service first came to Attleboro in 1835, when the Boston and Providence Railroad connected the two New England cities over essentially the same route now used by Amtrak. But by 1900, massive increases in the volume of trains necessitated a major upgrade in the railroad, including additional tracks and improved safety equipment.

In Attleboro, a 1907 reconstruction project resulted in the main line being elevated, along with the installation of new signals and construction of a new passenger depot and signal station.

The tower, which contained levers that allowed railroad men to set and reset switches, was at the heart of a spidery web of tracks, switches and signals spread throughout the city. Trainmen could observe approaching and passing trains through second story windows shaded by overhanging eaves.

The first floor contained machinery that allowed the trainmen to align the switches using either a system of bars and levers or a set of electro-pneumatic controls.

At some towers, Drummond said, operators might also be in charge of other railroad facilities, such as a drawbridge.

Steve Olawsen, senior architectural historian for Public Archaeological Laboratories in Pawtucket, said there's at least a slim chance the old tower could have a future.

A proposed memorandum of agreement between the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak might include provisions for a local group to move the structure and preserve all or part of the structure and its equipment to be salvaged for historical purposes. In that case, the railroad would have to advertise that the building is available.

The fact that the structure is off the road and elevated well above ground level would make the structure hard to move, Olawsen said. A final verdict on the demolition is likely before the end of the year, Olawsen said.