Church Street (GA 45), Iron City, GA
Posted: Thu Aug 29, 2019 2:10 am
Signal on the left: 2.5 pairs of WRRS 8 inch lights, 1 Federal Signal 8 inch light, a WRRS mechanical bell, a WRRS gate mechanism, and RECO LED gate lights.
Signal on the right: 1.5 pairs of WRRS 8 inch lights, 1 WCH 8 inch light, a WRRS mechanical bell, a Safetran gate mechanism, and RECO LED gate lights.
This was the fifth crossing I caught A724 at. This crossing is a pretty nice one, and appears to be a mostly original early SCL crossing, though there's obviously been a few changes to the signals over the years. It appears that the first major change was that one of the lights on the far signal was replaced by the SCL, likely due to it getting struck and necessitating replacement. Then, in the early 2000s, it appears, the gate mech on the closer signal was replaced with the current Safetran gate mech. According to street view, the crossing didn't have any major changes after that up through 2013, even still retaining a pair of cats-eye crossbucks! Sadly, as you can easily see, the cats-eye crossbucks have since been replaced, unfortunately.
Since 2013 as well, it appears that the far signal lost a visor on one of the side lights, and the left-rear light on the closer signal was replaced. Not entirely sure why it was replaced, but if I had to guess, Hurricane Michael broke off the old light, so CSX replaced it. Fortunately, they chose to re-use a WCH 8 inch light from another crossing rather than replace the rest of the 8 inch lights here!
Believe it or not, this was the only crossing I recorded along the line with two working WRRS bells! The closer one, sounds rather rough unfortunately, but it's nice to see two working WRRS bells at a crossing like this.
As you can also see, the Safetran gate mech here, despite being much newer, is broken, failing to lower all the way. In fact, due to this issue, it causes the WRRS bell on the closer signal to remain on a bit longer than the far signal, which obviously ain't doing the bell any good. The WRRS gate mech on the far side appears to work perfectly fine, other than maybe being a bit slow when raising. One of the gate lights here is also a bit damaged.