Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

*originally recorded on 9-20-19*

Signal on the left: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a General Signals Type 2 electronic bell, a Safetran gate mechanism, and RECO LED gate lights.
Signal on the right: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a General Signals Type 2 electronic bell, a Safetran gate mechanism, and RECO LED gate lights.

After catching the train in Townley, I chased him on over to Jasper. I was going to record the crossing immediately to the west of here, as it had some old BN WCH signals, but I found out that BNSF had replaced those sometime recently and that crossing was also malfunctioning. So I decided to head on over to this crossing instead, where I wound-up meeting a local railfan.
For whatever reason, this crossing failed to deactivate for about a good minute after the train had passed. Thinking that this crossing was stuck down like the other malfunctioning one, I decided to go ahead and head on and try to get him in Cordova, only for the crossing to finally deactivate once I was tossing my camera in the car...
Oh well.
On the bright-side though, this crossing does still retain a pair of late-BN signals from the mid-90s, with really the only major changes being that both of the original Safetran mechanical bells were replaced at some point.

No changes as of 11-13-20:

*originally recorded on 12-13-24*

Signal on the left: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a General Signals Type 2 electronic bell, a Siemens gate mechanism, and RECO LED gate lights.
Signal on the right: 2 pairs of Safetran 12x20 inch lights, a General Signals Type 2 electronic bell, a Siemens gate mechanism, and RECO LED gate lights.

On December 13th, I went down to Jasper and met-up with my friend EquusStorm to do some railfanning on the BNSF Birmingham Subdivision. We went to this crossing first, as I'd been meaning to rerecord it for a while, and thankfully found that a westbound was lined through South Jasper. Soon, the signal to our west upgraded to clear, and we were able to get our first train of the day: an empty coal train with an ES44ACH leading an ET44ACH on the head-end and a pair of ET44ACHs working as the DPUs. Interestingly, two of the ET44ACHs on this train (the one on the head-end and the second DPU) are sister locomotives, which you don't see too often.

BNSF had replaced both of the original Safetran gate mechs here with the current Siemens ones sometime after I last recorded this crossing back in 2020. Not entirely sure why they did that, maybe the gate mechs had just simply failed or something. Either way, they thankfully left the lights here incandescent, making this the last crossing on the BNSF Birmingham Sub in Jasper to still be incandescent. Not often you see a BNSF crossing with modern Siemens gate mechs and incandescent lights though, at least in my experience.

http://www.rxrsignals.com/Alabama/G-Q/Jasper/A/