Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

So one of my friends is moving to live with her dad in Taunton, and on the way to drop her off, we found that a railroad crossing on Dean St. had been upgraded! I remember it was previously a passive crossing owned by CSX, with crossbucks only. Here's the crossing before the upgrade...

When coming from Arlington St. on Google Maps, it's still shown as a passive crossing. But when you get onto Dean St., you'll see it's now an active crossing!





The whole crossing got fitted with gates, red lights and bells. Even when coming from Arlington to Dean, there's a crossing gate protecting it (too bad if you want to turn right, away from the crossing, when a train is coming though!)
The signals are equipped with 12" flashers (probably LED) and WCH e-bells. IDK who made the gates and lights, but they are probably WCH, given the bells.
I believe ownership of this crossing has been passed on to the MBTA, judging by the blue DOT signs on the signal masts. I think the CapeFlyer express now runs on that line, so the MBTA wanted to make sure they had gates on all of those crossings (from what I've seen, the MBTA wants practically all the railroad crossings they own to have gated signals.)

Next time I am down there, I'll snap pics of the crossing and provide its' information and submit them to the main RXR signals page, along with a couple other crossings I saw in Taunton.

Yea, it appears everything is WCH. In fact, the gate mechs appear to have been re-used, surprisingly. And with the light-heads that they use, the lights are going to be LED.

Thread bump, because three other crossings in Taunton were upgraded back in September. The old crossing signal setups still appear on Google Earth (they are on Winthrop St., Porter St. and Cohannet St.) Prior to this September, the crossings had what appear to have been Safetran gated signals with 8" incandescent lights and mechanical bells, along with the crossbucks being in the Harmon font (a staple on CSX crossings.)
The three crossings all now use WCH signal masts, gate mechanisms and 12" LED lights. They were also fitted with Railway Equipment Co. E-Z gates (including pedestrian gates now) and a General Signal e-bell at each crossing. There is also a strobe light at each crossing (on top of one of the signal masts where a bell would typically go) that I learned is used to warn locomotive engineers that they are approaching a crossing.
The line is currently owned by Mass Coastal, with CSX running four to five freight trains a day through the town. I have submitted these three crossings along with the Dean St. one (the former passive crossing that had signals and gates installed early last year) to freebrickproductions for a future Massachusetts update (this will also include updates in Bridgewater, Abington and Hanson.)