What does a *black* semaphore blade mean?

Found in the Jointed Rail Semaphore pack by wearsprada is an 04 signal with a black blade.

Now I know some roads did their own thing, and that there was a more or less standard regarding pointed, fishtailed, squared etc. Shapes and the use of red and yellow blades, but I can't find anything about black on the engineer facing side of the blade.

At first I assumed it was a not-in-use signal, but they act just like any other 04 type signal.

So does anyone have any insight on the use of that particular color? (The 04s also come in the standard square end red with white stripe, btw - so its clearly an "alternate" skin)

Um, I'm pretty confident that no railroad or railway ever used a black semaphore arm, as it defeats the purpose of it being a warning device (it would be almost invisible in even overcast conditions). Are you sure it's not just a normal signal that it's textures have glitched due to a bug?

It actually sounds like the old Trainz hardware texture compression bug showing it's ugly head again - textures will either be totally white, totally black, or weird multiple colours. The way to fix it was to open the offending item in Content Manager as Open for Edit, then with the item selected go into Content Manager's settings and make sure 'Enable Hardware Texture Compression' is not ticked (if it is, and it would be if this issue is occurring, click the tick off), then click ok and commit the item. The broken texture should now work properly (for some reason every time I've reinstalled 2010 it's enable hardware texture compression by default).

Otherwise I have no idea.

You are not seeing the back side are you?

On the back side of the blades, which faced away from the direction of movement, or the direction from which the engineer would view a signal, colors commonly used were black and grey, some with white stripes, and some with none – usually the grey ones.
source

Me said:

...but I can't find anything about black on the engineer facing side of the blade.

Click to expand...

I dunno, did I?

Let's try this...

Paging

wearsprada said:

why did you make a black 04 Hall Semaphore?

Click to expand...

Should have just started there...