Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

Came across this tooling around on Streetview:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source= ... 23,,0,6.53

It is a one lane railroad underpass controlled by a traffic light! Bridge is quite narrow too if you move forward and "drive" through it. Can't imagine anything much larger than a regular car going through there, and it appears to be quite a busy street.

That bridge is only 15 minutes away from me! I'm very familiar with that bridge. IDK what was going through the minds of the engineers when they decided to build the bridge that wide, but as a matter of fact, it is a VERY busy street. Clifton Park is a large town and people commute to either Schenectady or Albany for work. That road serves as the secondary route to Schenectady (there's a few roads you can take, but they all lead to the same place, so no matter which way you go, rush hour is IMPOSSIBLE). Those traffic lights of course are NOT origional. They used to be 8" lights (one of the four was mounted on the side pole), but were replaced a few years ago.

Coincidentally, that railroad line contains quite a few crossings that have WRRS mini-bells.

weatherdan882002 wrote:... IDK what was going through the minds of the engineers when they decided to build the bridge that wide, ...

Perhaps it was just a minor dirt farm road when the track was put in.

weatherdan882002 wrote:Coincidentally, that railroad line contains quite a few crossings that have WRRS mini-bells.

Yeah... that is the reason why I was surfing around that area. I was enjoying some of the old signals on that line. Many of them with 8 inch lights and as you said mini-bells.

The new traffic signal that was installed in Yale about 1-2 years ago now, has LED lights. I cant tell weather they are Ball LED's or not. But the pedestrian crossing has one of those timers on it, like this one.



Heres what the signal in Yale looks like. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source= ... 6,,0,-3.68

I love these signals.
Often I can tell I will not make the signal, so I start coasting and save fuel, pollution and vehicle wear and tear.
Is even helpful when driving red lights and siren. I don't start the siren if the signal will still be green.

I like those too, and I wish those could make it around here, but we're still using the old hand and walk LED indicators with no timers... I want those here really badly.

Smjh1979 wrote:I like those too, and I wish those could make it around here, but we're still using the old hand and walk LED indicators with no timers... I want those here really badly.

In China they have count-down traffic signals. [55],[54],...[03],[02],[01], [40],[39],[38]....[03],[02],[01]
They more easily allow one to see when to start decellerating because they will not make the signal.
Yesterday I continued to gently accelerate up to the 45 mph speed limit just to have a signal make all that fuel wasted by bringing us to a stop.
Had I known it was going to change I would have accelerated much less and then coasted instead of braking from 45 mph.

I do the same thing... I have made it a habit to check the ped signal countdown to know whether or not I'm going to make it through on a green.

Rather obvious that was not the intention of whomever invented it... but I'm sure it is used more by drivers than by pedestrians.

I do the same here, when I can see it. Some traffic lights here do have a little extended green time after the countdown reaches zero, however in some places, it does change when the countdown hits zero. Maybe later this year if all goes well, I'll take some video.