A blog devoted to explaining the ins and outs of North American railroad signaling, past, present and future. This blog seeks to preserve through photo documentation the great diversity and technical ingenuity of 20th century signaling and interlocking hardware and technology. Related topics cover interlocking towers and railroad communications infrastructure.
Note, due to a web hosting failure some of the photos and links may be unavailable.
In this age of Darth Vader signals and shiny metal structures, it's nice to find a railroad that isn't afraid to stick with tradition, especially if tradition means thinking outside the box. It wasn't long ago that signal departments would customize their hardware based on local circumstances or what they had sitting around the shop, as opposed to whatever some subcontractor is influenced to buy.
Take the new interlocking at the west end of the new Wachusett MBTA station on the Guilford's Freight Main Line. The eastbound mast signal has been installed across the opposite main line track requiring a doll arm. If this isn't rare enough the Guilford decided to use a blue marker light instead of a blue reflector and even then they went with a GRS marker searchlight instead of something current.
If that wasn't odd enough look at the Westbound signal. Instead of a cantilever or signal bridge the Guilford went with a three track bracket mast. I'm not sure I am aware of a similar structure in North America. The rightmost signal is an automatic for the opposite main, the center the adjacent main and the leftmost, the station track.
Of course it doesn't stop with signals as one can see with the second hand standard cab GE's. :-)
For about 14 years my primary web hosting was a student computer club at a major university. Memberships and server access were off the lifetime variety and the group was very well established and all the stuff that normal web hosts typically charge for, like bandwidth and hardware, was free. Well, never make assumptions because in the age of smart phones and apps, kids these days don't know how to run servers anymore and after a literal server meltdown in October 2017, there was simply nobody with the skills to get things running again and also not much demand because...apps and AWS. My emergency mirror webhost for many years had also been forced to shut down leaving me to rely solely on Google's various free services. While this is pretty good for text, photos and videos, I was unable to host general files and my content went from appearing in most rail searches on Google to practically none of them as Google Photos aren't searchable (go figure).
Anyway, after a year of waiting in vain for the students to get their butts in gear, Eric Haas of Redoveryellow.com came to the rescue. I don't know how long his amazing generosity will last, but as long as it does you should be able to find my photo archive at https://www.redoveryellow.com/position-light/. I still plan to future proof my blog posts with Google and anyone else who wants to host a mirror, but at least in the short term I should be able to restore all the dead links to my own content. It might take a few months for me to actually restore all of the gallery indexes and probably longer to fix the links but please bare with me. Anyway, to celebrate I went to the trouble of restoring my two pages on Amtrak's THORN interlocking and Amtrak THORN tower, which not only needed the photos to be reprocessed, but also re-uploaded and most of the links fixed.
In addition, I recorded two streaming sessions as I re-edited the photos with all sorts of historical commentary and fun stories learned from the THORN operators back in 2005. I don't usually promote my attempts at live content, but there's a lot of good signaling and tower info in them.
Finally, I wanted to mention that I have uploaded Mark Beij's PRR interlocking diagram collection to a sub-directory. I did not create an index (yet), but they should show up on Google at some point so the archive should be discoverable once again. For anyone who forgot, the Keystone Crossings site folded about a year ago, taking with it a valuable trove of Web 1.0 era information on the PRR. This just emphasizes the need to backup, archive and mirror any valuable you might come across. Anyway thank you again Eric and if anyone else wants to provide mirror space please let me know.
In a somewhat surprising bit of bad news, EAST BRIDGE JUNCTION interlocking tower closed a week or two ago. Operated by the New Orleans Public Belt at the east end of the Huey P. Long bridge in New Orleans, EAST BRIDGE JCT contained a GRS Model 5 pistol grip style interlocking machine and had been mirrored by WEST BRIDGE JCT up until a few years ago when that tower was also closed. The loss of these two towers, combined with the recent closure of LENOX near St. Louis is a major blow to main line electro-mechanical interlocking.
East Bridge Jct at Night in 2015
And in daylight.
Although in this day and age no classic tower closure should be a surprise, the demise of the two BRIDGE JCT towers has surprised me. Both were operated by a publicly owned railroad and not only are public railways typically strapped for capital improvements, the NOPB lacked any sort of main line or need for a dispatching center, making tower control less of a waste. The towers were also located in the American capitol of corruption and their staffing and maintenance requirements provided a good number of patronage jobs. As you can see the towers were well appointed with external stairways, roofs and lighting. If Hurricane Katrina couldn't kill them I figured that nothing could, however I Union Pacific did some wheeling and dealing to get the towers closed and placed under the control of their own dispatchers :-(
The PRR "Pedestal" signal was actually invented for the Philadelphia Suburban Station approach viaduct in 1927. Until that time the PRR only had high signals and dwarf signals for low speed operations. The underground station and its approaches needed a high signal that could fit in the restricted clearances of BROAD interlocking. Thus, the Pedestal signal was born with two PRR dwarf units stacked on top of eachother much in the same fashion as two searchlight units being stacked.
As you can see the Pedestal has the appearance of a single cast unit with access plates for each signal head and a junction box. However many of the signals in the SEPTA BROAD interlocking complex have a slightly different design that appear to be two dwarfs welded into a single assemble with no junction box. Now I don't know if these are 1927 prototypes or something SEPTA bodged together in the 1980's BROAD re-signaling project that retired the Model 14 machine (I suspect the later)
Anyway, it looks like SEPTA is at it again with an ersatz Pedestal signal for no other reason than new Pedestal signals are no longer available in their original configuration. I can't say if the job was a custom commission or something from the catalogue, but SEPTA purchased some rather boxy PRR Pedestal substitutes for some of the automatic signals on the Suburban Station ramp.
While similar the differences are quickly apparent. The entire backing has depth, instead of just acting as a mounting point for two PL dwarfs and a junction box.
Lamps are of course lunar LEDs and the manufacturer is L&W, a small time signal outfit I have encountered before with LED searchlights.
Here you can see how they compare with an "original".
And a fiew from the side showing off the depth.
As cheap as these new signals look, I have to commend SEPTA for taking the time to replace like with like, instead of starting on a color light campaign or just going to Rule 562 as they have most other places on their system. Similar choices were made with replacement amber PL high signals at ZOO and ARSENAL.
