Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

freebrickproductions wrote:Not entirely sure why the bell automatically shuts off after a while, but I wonder if there was once gates there or something.

Interesting thought. Though aren't bells mainly hooked up to stop when the gate is fully lowered, and in the instance of someone or something pushing the gate up, it would sound off again?

ZachL wrote:

freebrickproductions wrote:Not entirely sure why the bell automatically shuts off after a while, but I wonder if there was once gates there or something.

Interesting thought. Though aren't bells mainly hooked up to stop when the gate is fully lowered, and in the instance of someone or something pushing the gate up, it would sound off again?

Believe it or not, this ain't the only gateless crossing in the US to have the bell ring for a while before automatically stopping, as according to Elliot, this crossing in New Jersey also does the same thing! Now, the reason I have for bringing this up is that the crossing used to have GRS Semaphore gate mechs, which have since been removed (obviously).

So my theory is, is that semaphore mechanisms have no way of "communicating" back to the relay case when they've lowered or raised all the way, like other gate mechs. As such, there was no-way to have a relay set-up to shut-off the bell once the gates lowered all the way, so they just set-up a timer to automatically shut off the bell after a while, around the time the gates would've fully lowered. Therefore, it's possible that the crossing above once had semaphore gate mechs, or at least a relay case that was reused from another crossing that did, and neither Conrail nor NS have ever bothered to update the relays, despite the obvious lack of gates.

However, I haven't done much research into this, so it's more than possible my theory is entirely wrong, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt. Also, it's worth noting that the crossing is on the site:
http://www.rxrsignals.com/Pennsylvania/ ... /Chestnut/

One of the bells on this Italian crossing is pretty flat, while the other two sound pretty healthy.

A couple of flat Safetran bells can be heard in this video:

freebrickproductions wrote:A couple of flat Safetran bells can be heard in this video:

It clearly isn't the low temperature along with the weather that is causing the bells to sound like that, is it.

Here's an off sounding alarm in the UK.

Messed-up e-bell here:

Here's a pair of very flat Safetran bells:

freebrickproductions wrote:Here's a pair of very flat Safetran bells:

Wow, wonder how they both sound like that.

ZachL wrote:

freebrickproductions wrote:Here's a pair of very flat Safetran bells:

Wow, wonder how they both sound like that.

It's probably the rate of speed of the bell.

Here is some a crossing(s) with a flat safetran bell






Not sure if this is a flat safetran bell.


Flat griswold bell that sounds like a WCH Mechanical Bell