Saturday, February 5, 2022

Approach, Three Ways

 About a year ago I stopped by a local interlocking in the depths of Camden, NJ with a rich Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines history.  CP-BROWN, formerly BROWN tower, is located at the junction of the former West Jersey and Seashore line to Vineland and other points south and the former Atlantic City Railroad Line to Ocean City and Cape May. In 2002 CP-BROWN and the adjacent CP-MILL were changed from position light to Conrail style color light.  15 years later as rail traffic to various South Jersey port facilities increased, Conrail Shared Assets re-signaled CP-BROWN again, adding a new interlocked switch to the former Bulson St yard, but in the process they also modified the northbound signals to reflect new conditions at CP-MILL, specifically the end of signaled track northbound.  

Under NORAC, the signal before a Restricting indication is an Approach type indication and CP-BROWN just happens to have the complete set of NORAC Approach type indications spread across three masts that can display only that and Restricting.  

Main track northbound signal 2N-1 offers up a straight Approach indication with an upper head yellow lamp and Restricting with a lower head yellow lamp.

Signal 2N-2 off the Beesley's Point secondary offers a single yellow lamp on the lower head that is used for both R/Y Restricting and R/*Y* Medium Approach.

 Finally the signal off the Bulson St track offers a single yellow lamp on the lowest head for R/R/Y Restricting and R/R/*Y* Slow Approach.  Note, aside from red, all the lamps on the upper two heads are blank. For whatever reason each head has the complete package of triangular mounted SafeTrain CL-20s and sun visor. 

So there you go.  Three masts, three Approach-type type indications in each of the three speeds (Full, Medium and Slow) with Restricting the only other option.  Pretty neat!


No comments:

Post a Comment