Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

It finally came! My latest edition to my crossing bell collection is here after waiting 2 and a half weeks for it to ship. I got this bell off of eBay from a seller who lives in Michigan. Both me and @BryantsRailfanProductions bought a bell from the guy. He bought a 1st gen wch mechanical bell while I bought this hybrid. The seller also had two wrrs mini bells, as well as an rrs (pre wrrs) mechanical bell. This has been a bell I wanted for a long time now since these bells are becoming rare. I will be cleaning the bell out as I've noticed a dead hornet that fell out of the bell. The seller did say the bell works, but I want to give it a good cleaning to see if it does anyway. As I've mentioned in the video, these bells do exist on the Mexico Sub but the ones that exist in Marshall, MO will all be replaced since the CPKC is going to be doing upgrades there. Last I checked, the ones in Alma, and Corder exist for the time being. I hope to record those at some point before they get replaced.

Update. I have tested it and it unfortunately doesn't work, but I will try to find. way to get it to work again. I'll most likely be restoring this bell, as well as fix up the rust on both the inside, and outside of the gong.

Nice! Shame it doesn't work, hopefully you can get that b-pack replaced with something that'll work.

Been thinking of trying an Arduino, but I need to figure out which board would be the best one to get.

Update. It turns out my hybrid does work albeit a bit flat. Not only that, but I did also recently get a 1st gen wch mechanical bell from the same seller I bought the hybrid from.

Vids I've took of both the Hybrid and WCH ringing on National Train Day.


I will be doing some work to both the WCH and Hybrid since they do both need a bit of TLC done to them. As you can see with the Safetran mechanical to the left. I rotated the gong on it.

Nice! I guess the sound could be due to the rust on the inside of the gong.