18th Street #3, Birmingham, AL

[freebrickproductions]

*originally recorded on 1-21-20*

Signal on the left: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a sick General Signals (Type 2?) electronic bell, a Safetran gate mechanism, and RECO gate lights.
Signal on the right: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a General Signals Type 2 electronic bell, a Safetran gate mechanism, RECO gate lights, and a RECO LED gate light.

After recording the traffic lights, I hung around the Bessemer/Fairfield area a bit waiting for a train on the CSX Mineral Sub. However, after waiting for a while, I decided to head up closer to downtown Birmingham and see how the crossings looked around there. When I got up here, I saw that there was an NS local freight going down the NS Ensley Branch towards the NS West End District, with another local freight stacked-up behind him. As such, I decided to set-up here and the second local freight came through shortly with two SD40-2s for power (with a sick RS3L on the leader), slowly making their way down the Ensley Branch alongside the first local, which had just picked-up a bunch of cars being stored on the second track just east of this crossing.

This crossing is a pretty decent one, though it's definitely seen better days. These signals appear to have been installed by NS in the early-2000s, and pretty much haven't seen any major changes since then, outside of the gate lights all being replaced. However, the signals do need a bit of TLC, as both
gate mechs seem to fail to lower all the way. However, the closer gate mech appears to get low enough for the bells to shut-off, while the far one doesn't appear to usually get stuck partway up when lowering, though it did eventually go down far enough during this activation, causing the bells to shut-off. The gate arms here, especially the closer one, are also looking a bit faded.
The far signal's bell is also quite messed-up. On the first activation, where the crossing quickly timed-out after activating, the bell rings about once and then shuts-off, but on the next one, it stayed active until the gates lowered. However, as you can probably hear, the bell is just messed-up altogether, not producing the proper tone. The second video shows a close-up of the messed-up bell, allowing you to hear it better.
There was a signal maintainer working on the next crossing over, which had broken bond causing that crossing and this one to activate periodically, so I went over and told him about the messed-up gate mechs and bell here, and he went to look at it after fixing that crossing. As such, I suspect the far gate mech is now properly fixed, though it appears the bell remains unchanged.
I-65 can be seen to the right of the crossing, and the CSX Mineral Subdivision can be seen crossing the road on the other side of this crossing. Despite having a rather modern CSX install, one of the signals there is leaning pretty badly.