A Tale of Two British Railway Signaling Public Information Films

 The UK is well known for a certain style of public information film that were professionally produced up through the 1980's. A couple go into great detail into the ins and outs of Railway Signaling and served as both a way to increase the public standing of the nationalized railways network in a time of both austerity and modernization and as a recruiting tool to bring new workers with new skills into said modernizing rail industry. 

The first film, entitled Electrical Engineering on the Railway and produced in 1962, falls more on the recruiting side of things as relay based "electric" signaling replaced largely mechanical manual block signaling on the busiest unresignaled main lines of British Rail. While this may been a bit odd as North American signaling has largely discarded purely mechanical signaling by the 1920's, Britain might get a bit of a pass given the toll a pair of World Wars took on its railways and economy.  Point of note include:

• A general lack of safety practices including, but not limited to protective clothing and burn pits for demolished signalboxes.
• The appearance of pneumatic point machines and North American supplied GRA Model 5A electric point machines.
• Rather flimsily looking track circuit bonding wires.
• The continued construction of brand new mechanical lever type interlocking frames.
• Some components of interlocking hardware being hand forged in house.
• A general use of North American pattern glass case plug-in and shelf type relays.
  

The second film, entitled Points and Aspects, was made in 1974 and shows the leap in British signaling from what one might call an updated basic CTC plan to something that was making far more use of computer and telecom technology to enable the so called wire area "Power Box" era of British signaling with as much automation as 1970's technology could muster..  This film is definitely trying to sell the public on British Rail not being a basket case and is worthy of their continued support and patience.  As a result an emphasis is given to the higher tech elements.

What is especially fascinating is that these two videos appear to span the moment when  the UK went from a very North American leaning approach to signaling technology, to a more European approach. Despite very different operating practices, North America and the UK had very closely aligned signaling supply companies with both GRS and US&S licensing UK technology and then supplying their own products back through local subsidiaries like Westinghouse. In the 1970's we are seeing the end of the glass case relays and Model 5 and M3 point machine that stared in the 1962 film.