Re: Church Street, Madison, AL
Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2025 1:14 pm
*originally recorded on 5-15-25*
Signal on the left: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a Siemens gate mechanism, and RECO LED gate lights.
Signal on the right: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a General Signals Type 3 electronic bell, a Siemens gate mechanism, and NEG gate lights.
On May 15th, vtgrxrman and I got on up and hopped out to do some local-ish railfanning. We first went to downtown Madison to get a couple of upgrades there documented, starting with this crossing. When we got there, we found out 286 was just finishing-up their work to our east, so we got set-up and waited. After a bit of waiting, we were able to catch our first train of the day: NS 286 shoving the cars they picked-up back to the rest of their train with an SD70ACe leading an AC44C6M and NS 8098, NS's Conrail heritage unit (an ES44AC), for power! Definitely a nice surprise getting a heritage unit for our first train of the day, even if it was trailing.
As you can see, the upgrade here has been finished since I last "properly" recorded this crossing. The closer signal here was replaced the day prior with the current one, which I got a couple of videos of on my phone at the time, that you can see on my channel already. As the upgrade only involved replacing the masts, the old SOU relay case here was thankfully retained, though I do also know that NS has long since upgraded all of the internal equipment in it with modern solid-state stuff. The bell here now rings while the gates are down, though I don't entirely know if that was an intentional change or not. I don't entirely mind it, however, as there ain't too many crossings in my area that have the bell ring until the gates rise like this unless I take a trip down to the BNSF Birmingham Sub.
I will say, it's nice to see that the new signals are incandescent, though I personally at least partially suspect that's due to the fact that this was very much an "in-kind" replacement that even retained the original relay case. Both gate arms and all of the gate lights here were reused onto the new signals, so the slightly worn-out tip of the closer signal's gate arm is still around as well. This is honestly a pretty nice upgrade all things considered.
https://www.rxrsignals.com/Alabama/G-Q/Madison/Church/