Holly Gibson Wrote:
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> Bring on the LEDs. They're a vast improvement
> over the older types of signals, such as the one
> depicted in the photo.

Only if they corrected the technological shortfalls. LED's are very heat sensitive. Extreme heat will kill them or shorten their service life. The other problem is a lack of heat emitted by the LED's. Also, LED's aren't hot enough to melt snow and ice accumulated on the lenses. A signal maintainer told me these limitations would prevent them from being installed in the desert or northern climates. Hopefully by now the technology has improved.

> On a somewhat related topic, can someone explain
> why management doesn't want crew members to use
> binoculars when observing signals? My feeling is,
> what's wrong with a little bit more of "advance
> notice" of what's up ahead?

Because good binoculars reach so far, you can sometimes see past the first signal. There was an engineer who ran a red block and crashed. He was on a yellow following another train so he went to the binoculars. It was a short block and the train ahead was just a few cars.

He saw a clear signal, throttled up, and crashed into the train ahead. OOPS! The clear signal was for the train ahead. This guy never noticed the red signal for his own train, too busy looking thru binoculars.