Just a light engine running toward Waterford to collect a laden sugarbeet train.
Except the light engine was NI Railways 112, a northern engine that had wandered far and wide on Irish Rail in the mid-2000s.
And the setting was Carrick-on-Suir where mechanical signaling and an antique track arrangement had survived. The date was 11 December 2004. It all seems so incongruous now.
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Between Albuquerque and Raton Pass (on the New Mexico-Colorado state line) I counted three bastions of Union Switch & Signal style-T2 upper quadrant semaphores on our journey over the former Santa Fe in Vista-Dome Silver Splendor.
I watched the blades drop from the vertical as we passed—a scene I’d not witnessed for many years.
In 2018, these signals represent the last large collections of active semaphores on any North American mainline.
The Style T2 was detailed in my book Classic Railroad Signals in a sidebar titled ‘Sante Fe Semaphores Survive in New Mexico’ by John Ryan and the late John Gruber.
Classic Railroad Signals was published by Voyageur Press in 2015. It is available at:
https://www.quartoknows.com/books/9780760346921/Classic-Railroad-Signals.html?direct=1
April Fools Day many years ago, My father and I visited St. Erth, Cornwall, where I made these Fujichrome Sensia II slides of the lower quadrant semaphores that controlled train movements there.
What?
It’s true.
Last week I traveled around Northern Ireland on a Translink Adult Zone 4 iLink day card, which allows for unlimited travel on NI Railways and Translink buses for a flat fee of £16. This offers great value and travel flexibility.
I arrived at Coleraine from Derry and wanted to make a photo of a train arriving at Portrush. Rather than take the branch train and wait around at Portrush for an hour to photograph the next arrival, I opted to board a bus.
Not only did the bus take less time than the train, but arrived before the connecting branch train was supposed to depart. This gave me time to explore my angles and set up my photo.
Portrush still features classic mechanical signaling, although on my visit the signal cabin was ‘switched out’. (In other words the cabin was not involved in controlling train movements on the line, which is a normal situation when there’s only one train at a time working between Coleraine and Portrush.)
Once the train arrived I made a few photos of it in the station, then boarded for the return trip to Coleraine (and on to Belfast).
As a follow up to yesterday’s Extra Post, I thought I’d display this image of a similar signal in the USA.
I made this photograph of three-position upper quadrant semaphores on the old Monon on a warm 2004 summer morning near Romney, Indiana.
