Reference Suggestions for Prototypical Signals, Switches, Crossings, Etc?

M

MickC57

Active member
Greetings everyone!
I am building a shortline route set in the foothills of the US Appalachian Mts in the late 40s/early 50s. Do you all have any suggestions where I can finds info for the typically used signals, switches, and crossings for that era? I have a bunch of books but searching through them has yielded very little detail.

Any direction would be a huge help.
Thanks!!
 
MickC57 said:
Greetings everyone!
I am building a shortline route set in the foothills of the US Appalachian Mts in the late 40s/early 50s. Do you all have any suggestions where I can finds info for the typically used signals, switches, and crossings for that era? I have a bunch of books but searching through them has yielded very little detail.

Any direction would be a huge help.
Thanks!!
Click to expand...

Fortunately, a few styles won out and became standardized fairly quickly.

This is a page which will be of interest to history buffs as well as those wishing to make their model railroad pikes historically accurate.

Semaphore signals appeared in an unusually large variety, as there were upper quadrant, lower quadrant, mechanically operated, air operated, electrically operated, and so on.....

Also, in the early days, let's not forget that G-Y-R was not always the standard. When colors were first assigned to signals, white was used for CLEAR, and green was used for APPROACH, or SLOW. Obviously, if a lens was busted out, you could see the problem with using white for clear! And in addition, purple was used in many places for the STOP indication, but usually only in dwarf signals. Today, lunar white is often used in the standard three color colorlight signal, making them a 4-aspect signal, following the G-Y-LW-R progression, where many locations have added the restricting indication. CSX seems to be using this a lot, as the old CPL signals used lunar white for the reverse 45 position for RESTRICT.

After the semaphores came a plethora of signal types: colorlights, searchlights, position lights (PL's), and color position lights (CPL's).

Colorlight signals were made by everyone. They could be vertical as most railroads employed, or horizontal as the CNW did. They could have any number of aspects on one head, three was the norm. In a typical interlocking arrangement, three 3 color heads would be mounted on top of one-another.

A variation of the colorlight signal was the GRS type-G signal, where the three lenses were arranged in a triangular format, with red on the bottom, and (usually) green to the right of the two on top. This signal is also called a "tri-light" signal by many, altho C&S people call them colorlights. I have been called to task for using the term tri-light, because the purists will tell you they are all tri-lights (not true), and besides, a US&S type G signal is a CPL.

Searchlight signals were manufactured by two main players: GRS and US&S. It uses one set of lenses, and has a miniature semaphore like mechanism to place 2 or 3 1" lenses in the light path to produce the desired color. They also use a smaller lamp (typically 10 watts vs 25 watts in a standard signal) because the lenses are very focused, and they use a reflector. There were favored by many western railroads who had signals way out in the middle of no-where in the days when the C&S guys had to go out and replace batteries on a regular basis because there was no local power to charge the batteries. Periodic calibration and adjustment of these types led to their eventual demise.

A variation on the searchlight signal was introduced relatively late (in railroad signal development time) by Safetran, called the Unilens.

Position Lights were developed by the Pennsylvania RR, and was seen on the N&W, Reading, and the Long Island Railroads. The signals employed one or two "heads" consisting of three to seven lamps assemblies, to produce an visual indication resembling that of the semaphore. Both NS and the LIRR has been aggressive in replacing the PL signals.

The B&O RR developed their own version of a Position Light signal, using two lenses for each aspect, and using only one main signal head, but then used a system of "marker lamps" to modify the "look" for additional indications. CSX has been very aggressive in replacing CPL's with colorlights, and very few remain in 2018.

The N&W later colorized their signals in the early to mid 60's, and they then resembled the B&O CPL's. NS has been aggressive in replacing the old CPL style signals, and as of 2018, very few remain.

Amtrak also modified the Pennsy PL's by turning them into colorized signals, and many call them PCL, for Position Color Lights. The Amtrak guys just call them colorlight signals.

For you young fellas out there, sorry you didn't get to see the heyday of PL's and CPL's, just as I feel sorry for myself for not being around in the hardcore semaphore days. I was born in 1951, but didn't acquire the interest in signals until they were almost all gone!

There are also a lot of one of a kind type signals that were around, but you had/have to know where they were in order to enjoy them Most of them seemed to be in the east coast, and in the Mid-Atlantic to New York City area. Some of these can be found here:
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/unusual/index.htm

My other signal pages are here:
https://railroadsignals.us/early/index.htm common signal types before the semaphores
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/sem/index.htm
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/cpl/index.htm
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/pl/pl.htm
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/color/index.htm
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/nwcpl/index.htm
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/pcl/index.htm
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/searchlights/index.htm
https://railroadsignals.us/signals/trilights/index.htm

If you are looking for the signal indications and aspects of the various railroads, I have ~118 different books scanned here:
https://railroadsignals.us/rulebooks/rulebooks.htm
 
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