Amtrak at night

[cabman701]

Caught Amtrak on my way home the other night at this crossing: http://g.co/maps/hnegy

The mast signal shown in Streetview was temporary. There use to be 2 identical cantilevers at this crossing but one got knocked down a few years ago. The new cantilever looks nothing like the other one now. Unfortunately hard to see that in the video... but I will try to get back here in the daytime soon.

Anyway, here is the video. Notice that as the gates go up the bells start back up for a few seconds. That is probably a false activation... these signals seem to do that from time to time.

[illinoistrains]

I know that crossing. I don't think the new cantilever looks that bad.

[cabman701]

I agree... the new one doesn't look bad. But paired with the older one it is quite a mis-match.

[illinoistrains]

I agree... the new one doesn't look bad. But paired with the older one it is quite a mis-match.

It would look much worse with one of the cantilevers downtown like this one:
http://maps.google.com/?ll=39.801769,-8 ... 5,,0,-3.52

Here is another crossing with mismatched cantilevers:
http://maps.google.com/?ll=39.797236,-8 ... 3,,0,-5.98

[cabman701]

Illinoistrains recently posted this crossing for the photo of the month:

1325819990_8015.jpg (180.53 KiB) Viewed 6194 times

I was able to catch this crossing in action last night for a southbound Amtrak. Sorry for the night videos but I don't get a lot of time to do this and caught this on my way home from work.

As you will see, some dumb barely even slowed down and crossed after the signals had activated.