Signal Brightness

I've been looking at alot of pictures of signals on railpictures.net and I've noticed some of these signals are fairly faint in daylight. Has anyone ever had trouble seeing the signal (Is it easier with 3 color signals) or is this just an effect of the camera lens. I usually get to see two sets of signals in real life, one is really bright but it's also brand new, the others I can only see at night.

Signal lights are positioned to where the train crew can see them best from the farthest distance, especially when they are on hills or curves. So most of the time unless you look at them head-on they won't seem very bright.

When the sun is behind them they are hard to see. Also if it is in front of them in the right time of day it kind of washes the color out, makes em look faint.

I don't like the searchlight signals. Yes, they are positioned where the crews can see them; however they are sometimes hard to see with the sun in your eyes. I much rather prefer the newer signals (with 3 individual lights). That way even with the sun in your eyes you can determine the aspect. I work on the line that runs west to east and deal with this all the time. I can't tell you how many times (while running on yellow) we stopped in front of the signal with the sun in our eyes and asked the dispatcher if we had the lineup.

Many European railroads have switched to LED type of singles for better visibility. For US railroads it would take probably another 1000 head-on collisions (signal visibility related) to consider such technology, but in the end it will be turned down due to high cost of replacement....

We have a few LED's here in Las Vegas. They are VERY nice indeed. You still have a hard time seeing them when the sun is directly in your face, however, once you are within 10-15 unit lengths away, you can see the aspect without a problem. Must be the way the light comes out of each diode vs. one bulb spreading light over the lens.

Then there's the way the IC signals are. There are several that are aimed so poorly between Chicago and Bluford, IL that you can't see the damned thing til you are 10 car lengths away and that's with good lighting conditons. That's the main reason I like running at night 100 times more than daylight.

We've got a couple LED signals at Ash Street interlocking (Freeport sub crosses NS & CSX) that are very easy to see. They are all pot signals and they're almost blinding at night.

SEPTA has replaced most of their signals on their main line with LED. It seems that all the new signals are LED these days.

Bring back the Semaphores.......... Even with the searchlights burnt out, you still got an indication........

Some of the searchlights had special bulbs....two filaments inside one bulb, and one filament was designed to run at less wattage and last longer. When the primary brighter filament burned out, the signal would appear dim, versus bright or burnt out. The train crew would note this, and the bulb would be eventually replaced by the signal crews.

CROR410 wrote:Some of the searchlights had special bulbs....two filaments inside one bulb, and one filament was designed to run at less wattage and last longer. When the primary brighter filament burned out, the signal would appear dim, versus bright or burnt out. The train crew would note this, and the bulb would be eventually replaced by the signal crews.

Thats a nice back up signal idea for filaments. Never saw one like it in person when I worked for Welch-Allyan in there lighting products div.