Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

I ran into this tonight at Vinewood Ave...
All the nuts fell off of the gate light wire...causing them to short out by touching each other...

I 'spose they shoulda kept the old lights.

Ha ha...fail.

In this situation...it was the bare leads of the gate light wire touching together to short out the front lights on this signal....but you can clearly see the lights from the mast signal on the other side towards the left of the picture were working ok. The maintainer re-wired the wires with new nuts and put a bit of electrical tape on them to keep them from coming off again and it fixed the problem. There was a train going at the time I took this picture on one of the middle tracks.

The maintainer put a 529A on the crossing...which is a stop and flag alert for the train crew.

I was there when he went over to the signal and found the wires touching. He had me hold them apart and went back to activate the signals. The lights worked fine. It was only the gate lights and front lights on the gated signal that were affected. The rear lights...and the mast signal lights on the other side worked ok. Don't forget that this setup around here is probably as complicated as it gets...with all the interconnects and the like, with lights cutting off here and there depending on what track the train is on...

A vehicle didn't hit the gate arm. He said that the wire nuts they used to use fall off. The insides come apart from the wire twisting part...and it exposes the wires. I guess that's what happened...but it still should of been caught before they all came off...