Red River Road (TN 25) #1, Gallatin, TN

[freebrickproductions]

*originally recorded on 12-7-23*

Signal on the left: 2 pairs of WCH 12x24 inch lights with Leotek EV Series LEDs, an NEG electronic bell, a Safetran gate mechanism, a RECO LED gate light, a RECO gate light, and an NEG LED gate light.
Signal on the right: 2 pairs of WCH 12x24 inch lights with Leotek EV Series LEDs, an NEG electronic bell, a Safetran gate mechanism, and NEG LED gate lights.

After I caught the RJ Corman train, I was packing-up my cameras when I heard I141 call a nearby signal. As I got going, I then heard them hit the Woodburn detector, so I quickly made my way over to I-65 and began chasing them south. I tried to beat them to a crossing in Portland, only for it to beat me to there thanks to traffic on TN 109. However, I was still able to beat it to this crossing in Gallatin, where, after a bit of waiting, I was able to catch CSX I141 coming through with an AC44CW leading an ES44AH for power.

This crossing is an alright one, though is very much one I wish I'd been able to record a few years ago. It appears that there had been a pair of old L&N signals (possibly a pair of cantilevers) here installed back in the 1970s. In the early-1990s, however, CSX replaced the older L&N signals here with the current pair of Safetran signals, which each had a WCH mechanical bell. Strangely, rather than using new Safetran 12x24s, CSX instead opted to reuse the early MI 12x20s from the old L&N install as the lights here. The crossing remained largely unchanged up until 2018, when CSX sadly upgraded this crossing once again. This time around, they replaced the MI lights with the current LED WCH 12x24s, and also replaced the WCH mechanical bell pair here with the current pair of side-mounted NEGs. In another strange move, rather than removing the bells entirely, CSX just removed the main bodies, and left the bases from the old mechanical bells in place on them instead. A bit more strangely, while doing this, the bases in question got rotated to face forwards for some reason, despite the bells having been removed. Either way, it's definitely bizzarre.
Thankfully, the far signal does still retain an incandescent gate light on it, which is rather nice to see. Admittedly, I hadn't intended on recording this crossing, though it's probably pretty easy to see why.

http://www.rxrsignals.com/Tennessee/G-Q ... ed_River1/