Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

KLM92 wrote:"Hmmm...one of my crossing lights isn't lighting up. I wonder why... Must be a bad bulb. grumble grunt climb climb climb twist twist flunk....OH SHAT! RUNNN!" http://www.flickr.com/photos/jehovahgod ... hotostream
HAHAHAH

Yikes!

KLM92 wrote:"Hmmm...one of my crossing lights isn't lighting up. I wonder why... Must be a bad bulb. grumble grunt climb climb climb twist twist flunk....OH SHAT! RUNNN!" http://www.flickr.com/photos/jehovahgod ... hotostream
HAHAHAH

That would scare the shit out of me, I'd porbable then jump off the latter and break my butt when I hit the ground.
That right there is one of my worst fears when I open up old signals
Writen on iPhone

Looks like some birds had previously occupied that lighthead, as well.

Small wasp nests are pretty common inside lights, or underneath the visors, but that's just insane!

AndyWS wrote:Looks like some birds had previously occupied that lighthead, as well.

Small wasp nests are pretty common inside lights, or underneath the visors, but that's just insane!

I saw the birds nest also. You have to wonder if that lighthead has been open for awhile (i.e. defunct crossing)... or maybe it just wasn't closed all the way? I can see a wasp or hornet crawling in there, but for a bird to squeeze in there just doesn't seem possible if it was closed all the way and the bolt tightened.

I bet one of the side windows is missing. :)
And been missing for a long time too. LOL :)

Man I'll tell you what, none of my signals would've ever got like that!

For some reason it looks more like honey bees to me but a bird first.

-------------------------

But it was always a crummy situation when you'd open a pole top box or pole
mounted dragging equipment door and wasps would come flying out all over.

You'd have to wait around for them to calm down enough so you could start
swatting them out of the air one at a time with your hat and stomping them
until you could at-least close the friggin door. It'd been quicker and easier to
deal with, if it'd been a rattlesnake! LOL :) No kidding.

Figured out a cure for them wanting to build nests in my dragging equipment
detector pole-mounted cases tho. Since there was no sealing them out, I
smeared a thin layer of "axle" grease on the ceiling and under the shelf and
under the very bottom. Worked great. :) ...then my job at Hayden Junction
Arizona got cut off. :/

On the mainline the first couple times bats flew out of a power cutout I'd just
opened spooked me pretty good but you got to expecting them and so got
to be no big deal. But some guys just never got used to those. LOL :)

Alvin in AZ

Pretty obvious paper wasp nests...

You can see a dead one on the lens.

Looks like a series of "generations" started nests one on top of the other...normally those wasps' nests only have one layer.

AndyWS wrote: Pretty obvious paper wasp nests...
You can see a dead one on the lens. {I can't tell it's a wasp;}
Looks like a series of "generations" started nests one on top of the other...
normally those wasps' nests only have one layer.

Cool. :)

I was born here in Arizona so I sure as heck wouldn't know what a paper wasp nest
looks like anywhere else. Here they are light colored and bee hives are dark and waxy
looking like that. Anyway, that's my only reason for thinking it was bees. :)

Funny how there's a picture of it like that too. I'm wondering if it was discovered by
a new maintainer and he wanted to show the level of maintenance that was being
done/not-done by the previous maintainer. ...or something like that maybe? {shrug}

It's obvious as anything the maintainer wasn't checking his crossing lights like he was
supposed to be doing. :/

Supervision would really freak out over things like that because they always had one
thing in their mind at all times... seeing a lawyer in court with 3' pictures of anything
they could find. Most of the jury wants to take money from the corporation and hand
it over to a poor-dumb-hurt-person/family anyway, so all it takes is something like
that to push the fence-sitters off their perches. LOL :)

I took over 4 different maintainer's districts and later relieved several. It was amazing
what all I found. The first one (Mesa) was the best kept district, only dusty inside the
cases was all.

Alvin in AZ

I would definitely jump from finding that in a light head.

KLM92 wrote:GOD DANGIT not again...wheres that can of raid.

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... id=1702417

ha ha...Can you say slack ass? You know it took them awhile to build that.

Any one up for some baseball and a race

Oh. My. God. That wasp nest gave me a serious freight. I get the willies every time I see that or a bee hive. WOW.