switch stands

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-------- Original message --------From: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> Date: 12/20/22  12:05 PM  (GMT-05:00) To: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> Subject: Re: switch stands  
   
    
   
  "4.  As for what most people would call ground switches (i.e. low level switch stands of the Ramapo Ajax type,)  N&W practice was to illuminate with oil switch markers those on tracks where there was a significant amount of traffic, say yard ladder tracks.  There may have been a specification about where illuminated switch markers were to be used in the N&W MW Standard Plans; I do not know.  Or there may have been a legal requirement - in Pennsylvania, the Public Utilities Commission required a light on switches which saw, on average, more than six engine/train movements per 24-hour day.  I do not know what the formal requirements were on the N&W as my typical excuse applies:  my function on the N&W was to push box cars around in the darkness, not to wrestle with the formal regulations and policies.  Of course, the advent of Scotch-Light reflectorized tape spelled the death knell of illuminated lamps on most switches.  N&W switches were converted from oil lamps to that garbage sometime in the 1960s.  Radford was the last place I saw still using oil switch markers, and that was sometime in the 1970s.  Interlocked switches, i.e. power-operated switches within interlocking limits, have never, since the earliest days, required a switch marker. "     By the late sixties, early seventies mainline switch targets were no longer illuminated nor did they have red or green targets. I was told so that they could not be mistaken for a signal aspect.Jimmy Lisle

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