A Superb Web Resource for Railroad Defect Detectors

 It's not often that one gets a new web resource that isn't annoyingly flawed (yeah you Open Railway Map) or compromised by enshitification (like Gas Buddy). I might be late to the party on this, but Defectdetector.net has somehow managed to document every railroad defect detector in North America and then provide the information via a clean Google Maps type interface. Not only do we have both large and small railroads included, each pinned location has the full set of details about the detector including make, model and, if available, a recording of the output. 

Of course nothing is perfect so if I had to provide feedback I would recommend ways to map defunct detectors and historic recordings. I would also enable filtering based on detector details like type (HBD, DED, etc) and also collect data on the information contained in the radio readouts like axle count or temperature. 

One specific usability issue is the SP/DRGW practice of equipping every automatic signal location with a physical impact stick style DED that is attached to the signal system, as opposed to a radio readout. This results in many Union Pacific routes having every ABS signal location pinned as a DED. While this can be helpful in some sense, it also clutters/slows the interactive map interface.  

While this site represents an amazing resource, I worry it will not last as Google maps integration isn't free. Airraidsirens.net, which I assure you is a thing, makes use of a Google Maps layer that fully lives in the Google ecosystem.

Open Railway Map's Signaling Layer is Hot Garbage

Open Railway Map (ORM) is a great resource that recently came on the scene to allow for fast identification and tracing of railway lines, rights of way and even individual tracks. Unfortunately as project that is based in Continental Europe, its coverage of North America (and the British Isles) has some serious shortcomings, especially when it comes to signaling and train protection systems. The information is incomplete and the presentation is seriously lacking. Ironically we have already seen a better way to present this sort of information in multiple railroad-produced employee timetables. 

In Europe almost all railway lines are considered signaled, with the specific method of block working, (ie manual, automatic, token, bi-directional, etc) not being as important as it is in North America. As a result the signaling layer mostly documents special train protection systems like ETCS, TVM420, LZB, etc. (Even then a lot of "National" ATS-like systems like AWS and Le Crocodile do not make an appearance, although PZB does.) 

 

When translated to North America the result is a generic tag for "PTC" and another for "ATC", even though neither labels refer to specific train protection systems as is the case on the European overlays. One might say the project got a little in over its head trying to color code every protection system, although they do have 40 color codes for speeds. The maps cannot seem to handle situations where multiple gauges, electrification systems or train protection systems are present on the same track segment.

The solution, at least for the North American segment, is to first dump the generic "PTC" and replace it with ETMS and ACSES. Next, drop ATC and replace that with Cab Signal System (CSS) and then add in "ETMS with CSS" where applicable. Since ACSES generally needs CSS there is no reason to restate the presence of CSS in that case. For a stretch goal I would add tags for CTC and ABS, however in a global context indicating bi-directionality is less important, so maybe a single TCB tag for "track circuit block" can be used where ETMS is not present. In the (currently) few cases where ETMS s present without TCB, and "ETMS with TWC" tag could be used. 

In an ideal world ORM could "stripe" colors where multiple tags apply in a similar fashion to the Union Pacific employee timetables which at one point were managing CTC, ABS, TWC, ATS, ATC and CSS systems, but that would probably require significant development time.

If ORM had some clear way to make contributions I'd be down to make the more basic changes myself wiki-style, but I can't see exactly how to do that and e-mails are going unanswered. Leave a message in the comments if you know what I'm missing.

Valleysignals.org.nz Fades Into History

While performing research on an upcoming post I regrettable discovered that the excellent Hutt Valley signaling website (aka Valley Signals) has gone offline with the domain, valleysignals.org.nz, now pointing to a reseller. Although focused on the specifics of signaling in Hutt Valley north of Wellington, it provided extensive detail on NZ signaling in general including the change from the relay to solid state era between 2001 and 2013. With photos, signal diagrams and quite a bit of inside information the Web 1.0 era site gave visitors all the necessary information with little fuss.

Originally hosted on Trainweb, it long ago moved to its own hosting and domain. Around a decade ago it backed up my own coverage of PETONE signalbox during its last few months of operation. Along with other web 1.0 websites like Blockstation.net and Mark Beij's signaling site (hosted on the defunct Keystone Crossings), it was easy to assume they would be be online forever. Unfortunately those with enough life experience to self-host websites in the 1990's and early 2000's are rapidly approaching the age where their heirs will be getting the emails about domain name renewal. 

Valley Signals Webmaster in 2013

From what I have gathered, the individual behind Valley Signals, who apparently went by Dave, started the site in 2001 as a way to document all aspects of railroad and railroad signaling history in the Wellington, NZ area.  The site was fully fleshed out over the following three years with regular updates through 2013 when Kiwi Rail implemented a major re-signaling project in the Hutt Valley, wiping out most of the relay based signaling. Unfortunately in a 2019 "site status" blurb, he mentioned having lost all interest in railways as of 2016, but had decided to keep the site up with some additional sections on his more personal interests. By 2023 the domain had lapsed. As we can see from the photo above the owner appeared to be at least in their 70's or 80's as of a decade ago. This unfortunately does not bode well for trying to rescue the site in an official capacity and because their contact info (e-mail) was based on the valleysignals domain, there is no longer a way to reach out.

The webmaster waving to the last train signaled through PETONE signalbox.

The good news is that the Wayback machine seems to have preserved most of the site contents and because the site was so static for so long, there was ample opportunity for it to be scrapped multiple times, so if you get an error for pages on the most recent dates, you can go back to 2013 without loss of content. Using this resource I was able to restore all the links on my PETONE signalbox page. Still, given the Internet Archive's own legal issues I will make an effort to save out as much of the Valley Signals content that I can. Despite the webmaster's assumed passing, if anyone knows what happened to the person or persons behind Valley Signals, please let me know as I might have some options to get a more official mirror back up and running.

RRPictureArchives Long Term Outage

It appears that the popular website rrpicturearchives.net has suffered a disc failure that will result in a long term outage.  Based on forum posts, the owner has had to send one or more parts of the database RAID to a third party recovery service. Rpicturearchives.net is well known for availability issues, but this might cause it to be down for many months.  I am posting about it as many of my posts make use of photos hosted on RRpicturearchives and as a result they will present as broken photo links. Hopefully the site will return to functionality, however if it vanishes for good I might be in a position to rehost some of the lost photos, although it would be a labor intensive process. As we have seen before with Blockstation.net and Mark Beij's site, many long time railfan web resources may be reaching the end of their tethers so where possible it might be worthwhile to save local copies of things you care about. 

NOTE: The site is back up, but it unfortunately may have irreparably broken image and page links, specifically the latter. If you see broken links from  RRpicturearchives let me know and I'll see what I can do.

THE Source for LIRR Tower Information

The rather secretive nature of the LIRR has always made it somewhat difficult to find information about its signaling infrastructure and interlocking towers. However over the past past 26 years Steven Lynch's decidedly web 1.0 LIRR Archive on trainsarefun.com has ballooned into an absolute juggernaut of quality information. In particular the page devoted to interlocking towers covers not only the current stuff, not only the recently closed stuff, but the towers that were displaced by the modernizations of the 1950's, 60's and 70's as well as the old block stations that were displaced by automatic signaling. While the layout is a bit haphazard, you will not find all sorts of reference material that is still relevant today like photos of now out of service interlocking machines in towers such as VAN and BABYLON.

If you are unaware of this archive check it out, especially if you are doing any sort of LIRR tower writeups, like several I have planned for the future.

German Stellwerke Blog and Its English Mirror

Although they have been prominent in my sidebar for many years, I wanted to give another shoutout to the German equivalent of this blog, Von Stellwerken und anderen Maschinen, because the author has been trying their best to provide English translations of some of the key articles in a paralell blog, Of Interlockings and Other Machines. 

 

While the former has hundreds of posts from over the last 10 years and the latter only about a hundred, the effort to provide some translations is particularly important in this niche subject because niche subjects have a habit of confounding automated translation tools like Google Translate.  While the Germany version of the site is still pretty readable if you stare at it enough, the large sample of English translation pages now on the mirror site allows one to really get a handle on how Central European interlocking machines and signaling systems work.  If you are looking for something to do on a cold winter weekend I highly recommend both of these websites as the author has a seeming endless supply of behind the scenes photos, both of in service equipment and preserved.

10 Years of The Position Light - A Milepost

Not sure anybody noticed, but May 28th marks a decade since I started this blog as a place to archive long form signaling related content I had previously published on old school web forums with limited visibility. Due to an odd coincidence at the beginning, I have accidentally committed myself to and then maintained a 49 post per year schedule with signaling news, history and general overviews of some of the more obscure topics such as interlocking horns. Over the past decade there was been way more bad news than good and I can't say that things stand to improve in that regard, but it has still been my privilege to mark the passage of so many pieces of both railroad and technological history. If one was to ask what I was most proud of it would likely be the comprehensive surveys of PRR Main Line and Port Road signaling along with the documentation of the late great METRA interlocking tower interiors.

I'm sure a lot of people out there would use this sort of milestone to pivot to some completely new/different project like elevators or some sort of history of history of the Bell System, however as tempting as they are I still have a whole bunch of unfinished projects lined up for The Position Light and I hope you all will still around for them.  These include, but are not limited to:

• A B&O Main Line signaling survey between Washington DC and Pittsburgh, PA that features most of the now removed CPLs
  
  
• Finishing up the remaining PRR Main Line interlocking towers that I have interior photos for including ZOO, PARK, CORK, STATE and AR.
  
  
• Additional LIRR and METRA towers that I still have unreleased photos for.

These are just the marquee items as I will still keep pumping out the content, rain or shine, good news or bad, 49 posts per year.  Thanks for reading.  Check out my Youtube Channel where I do signaling related live-streams on a somewhat bi-weekly basis.  Also remember to like, subscribe and don't forget to hit that bell notification. 😏

Photo Archive is Back (For Now)

I just wanted everyone to know that I used some of my corona virus time to get the remaining years of my photos archive back up where it can be accessed in an convenient manner.  For those of you who don't know in 2017 I lost both of my conventional web hosts and was forced to fall back on Google for my photos and nothing for my other content.  In 2019 Eric at RedOverYellow.Com was generous enough to provide some generic file storage and like I just managed to finish all of the re-uploading.

But wait, there's more!  I am also in the process of fixing the dead links in this blog and have so far gotten up through 2014 (which is pretty good since the newer posts don't suffer from as many broken links ;-) ).  Specifically this includes a lot of PDF documentation like employee timetables, builtin orders and rulebooks. 

Please take note that due to some limitations on the hosting I have to eliminate most of the photo specific HTML landing pages.  Also, due to a variety of reasons such as age or just me loosing the data, that some links simply cannot be restored.  In these cases I will leave the links dead on the page just so people are aware that the information used to exist and now no longer does.

I am still looking for additional mirrors, especially from museums or long running institutions.  I have leaned the hard way that the internet does not last forever, so the best I can do is try and find a home for my archive that can stand the test of time.

Trackside Photographer Profiles NY Central Towers

The Trackside Photographer is a great publication and I've have been tapped a few times to provide content there.  Recently I noticed that another contributor appears to be running a feature on New York Central railroad interlocking towers in the Metropolital Region where he got to spend time as a kid with his dad, who was a tower operator. At this point NW tower in North White Plains and OW tower in Ossining have been profiled and I suspect that a few additional towers are in the pipeline.

The posts are comprehensive, discussing operations, history, mechanics, you name it, all bound together with a great personal touch.  Central towers are woefully under-documented compared to PRR and Reading towers for reasons I have yet to figure out and at this point Trackside Photographer is the only publication trying to pick up the slack  In fact the site has a whole interlocking tower category, and while some of the listed posts can be a bit lite on tower content, they are nevertheless worth checking out.

Blockstation.Net Goes Down

Another indispensable web 1.0 resource for those interested in Amtrak's NEC operations appears to have gone down in the last few weeks.  Blockstation,net was a small site dating from 1998 that published a set of 1992 vintage Philadelphia Division track diagrams that the site owner had made for Amtrak using MS Paint.  Covering then-CTEC Sections A, C/B, F and G, the site had some additional interior photos and information on a number of individual towers including PENN, BRWN MAWR, THORN, PARK, CORK, STATE, HARRIS and oddly enough, BALDWIN.

The good news for everybody is that I had saved hard copies of most of the informational parts of the site (at the time I didn't feel that the index pages needed saving).  This includes all of the diagrams and all of the tower pages with textual descriptions and detail photos. You can find this content here or here.

Let's all hope that the site returns.  On the pages I do have the author was listed as Ken Reinert who was using an Erols.com e-mail address that no longer functions. Like I said the page seemed to have been populated once back in 1998 and then completely left alone for the next 21 years.  For all I know the server it was running on may have been lost in some data center sort of like Milton from Office Space and some sysadmin may have simply rectified the error. it could be that poor Ken has passed away and the web hosting and/or domain name registration may have finally lapsed.

This is why I tell people that over the long run, the "cloud", is not reliable and that people need to make hard copies of everything they find important! With Yahoo Groups having been unilaterally wiped out just this past weekend, this is especially true as Web 1.0 content may be literally reaching end of life.  Fortunately I had saved this content way back in 1999 because then what was online was seen as fleeting and unreliable on a more relatable time scale. That means today in 2019 I just have to deal with another round of dead link fixing and instead of having to restore the lost content.

Yahoo Shutting Down Yahoo Groups

For those you who who either didn't get the e-mail or don't log into their old Yahoo or Hotmail accounts anymore, Verizon, corporate parent of the internet giant formerly known as Yahoo!, announced that it is pretty much gutting the Yahoo Groups service and converting it to a a system of e-mail lists.  If you are wondering why this impacts the signaling and rail history communities it is because those groups were some of the best communities for discussing rail history and signaling  between the years 2000 and 2007 when other, more hip, venues became available. 

Not only were these groups' archives web accessible, Yahoo also provided a small amount of user file storage which was a huge deal when the only other solution was to run some sort of private message board or file store.  As part of the changeover these archives and file stores will be deleted on December 14th, so if there is any content that needs to be saved, get it now. 

While I don't think the loss of a couple hundred megabytes worth of documents and low res photos from groups such as Railroad Signaling, RailwaySignaling 2, Interlocking Towers, Block Tower and AmtrakNec will be the Internet's worst loss, these archives are an important record of the signaling discussions that took place on the adolescent web.  Most of these groups have barely been used in almost a decade and some were infiltrated by porn and other span posts as the moderators moved on.  Unfortunately, increased internet and privacy regulation has made the user uploaded content a potential source of liability and therefore it is being deleted. 

Those boards with active communities are currently looking to move to Groups.io which has a a Yahoo Group data migration system.  If you were part of one of these communities you might want to check back in to see if your group is moving and if there is anything you want to save, do it before December.

Website: Hidden Trackside Treasures Of Southwestern PA

I wanted to take a moment to plug another blog I just found that takes an in depth historical look at the PRR Main Line between Altoona and Pittsburgh.  Given the title, I am sure that it will eventually cover other topic, but at this point the articles have focused on the PRR Main Line, specially the transition from the Classic PRR configuration of the 1950's and 1960's. to the modern Conrail configuration of the 1980's. 

 The articles are well researched with much scanned and displayed primary source material. One series covers the lost interlockings and interlocking towers of the Western PRR Main Line, like Latrobe's KR tower, seen above. 

The future CP-WING, with and without CTC applied as the Penn Central envisioned it.

Another series covers the Penn Central's plan to convert the PRR Main Line to CTC operation a decade or two before Conrail was able to complete the task with its influx of Federal funding.  It's just say things would have been a lot more interesting if the line was rebuilt with the PC's understanding of how railroading would work.

My only criticism is that over the past 3 years there have only been a handful of posts, so let's show the creator some appreciation with the hope that he'll increase his output ;-)

New Web Hosting and THORN Tower Page Revamp

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.

Great Resource on Chicago Area Rail Junctions

From the title you might think I am here to plug the Chicago Rail Junctions website, but surprisingly I am not! The prolific Industrial Scenery blog has a "minor" section devoted to Chicago area rail junctions with all sorts of historic background and photos with maps, diagrams, Google Earth views and tower interiors. All you have to do is hit up the "towerJunction" label to get pretty much an unending supply of junction histories. 

Some of the photos are old, some of the photos are new, but a lot of them seem to be from Facebook groups that the Googable web has very little insight into.  I highly recommend this site and although Junctions are only a small part I still haven't reached the end of the archive xD

Mark D Bej's The Broad Way Archive Gone

It seems that I'm not the only person running into a hosting jam lately.  For literally the last 20 years when I have needed information on one PRR era interlocking or tower I have dutifully gone to Google, typed in "Maps of the PRR" and been taken to broadway.pennsyrr.com, and been taken to a wonderful Web 1.0 gem that gave me my information with little fuss.  The PRR part of the site had the aforementioned archive of interlocking sheets while else where on the file tree was a general signaling site with a good yet somewhat incomplete listing of signal rule sets and explanations of operating principles.

Unfortunately Mark's The Broad Way site was hosted on Keystone Crossing, a long running PRR history website that also hosted my interior photos of STATE tower in Harrisburg that I took in 2003. As the decades past the site owner Jerry Britton was overtaken by mounting costs and shrinking ad/donation revenue and I never noticed that he had announced the site's closing. While a stub of Keystone Crossing is still up (for now) most of Mark's page has completely vanished from the internet. 

Fortunately, back in the day when broadband internet was yet to be a thing and websites were often highly unreliable, I was obsessive about saving everything to disc and I have long since backed up The Boad Way's interlocking charts as well as the html pages they were linked from.  These have now been uploaded to Google Photos.  Moreover, a lot of the site was archived here, including the HTML copy of the 1956 PRR rulebook.   

I am still trying to find out what happened to Mr. Mark D Bej and/or the full contents of his website.  For all I know he may have passed away,  but if he is still out there, and if I can get my own hosting back, I might be able to get his content back online. I am sorry I was unaware of KC's problems as I would have done everything I could to drum up donations and support.  Meanwhile, some of KC's content has migrated to a PRR group on groups.io.  Of course I am now going to have to go through my own posts to change all of the broken interlocking chart image links 😢