Questions on Railroad Signals

[Bart1701]

I had been looking for non-operational railroad signals for a while. After practically searching the entire Internet, I was able to find these Greenmax signals. They are labeled as 1/150th scale, and they measure about 22 feet in height for N-Gauge.

I will be painting them an aluminum color, and the backs of the heads will be painted black (currently they are white).

I could only find single-head signals, but I have several spots on my layout where I will need 2-head signals. I bought enough of these single-head signals and think I should be able to cobble something together from these to create the 2-head signals that I need.

Question 1: Are single-head signals and 2-head signals the same overall height, with the additional signal head just placed lower on the post? ...or are the 2-head signals taller than an single head signal, with the additional signal head basically added to the top of a single-head signal post?

Question 2: Since these are non-operational, what would you suggest to do for the lenses? Just paint one of the lenses on each signal, or paint all three in subdued shades of red, yellow and green (so it suggests the 3 colors, bit doesn't really indicate which lens is lit? ) If I paint just one lens, I will be dis-obeying a lot of signals as I run trains around.

Question 3: Is Greenmax still in business? Are there any good sources for their products on the web other than Amazon and eBay?





Thanks,
Bart
 

[C855B]

#1: Yes, generally speaking. There are a gazillion exceptions or conditions for pole height specs, but typically there is a "standard" size on a given RR and additional heads populate the same size pole top down, even up to three heads (and four... really!... in the case of a call-on or other indicator).

#2: In most cases colors are not visible unless an indication is illuminated. Two reasons - first, the lens is a "doublet", with inner and outer lenses, and the outer lens is clear; second, a subtle presence of other colors would risk ambiguity and increase the chance that a headlight would reflect back a false indication. If it were me, for a better appearance I would paint the desired fixed indication location white first and then use a transparent paint for the color.

#3: Yes: http://www.greenmax.co.jp/. Others on TRW know of an online dealer who sells Japanese-only product to US customers and will hopefully see this.

[Philip H]

Plaza Japan is your best net for an eBay "store" dealing in Greenmax and other brands.  Not sure if you can soecila order though. I have also used 1999.co which is the web address for Hobby search (?) - a full ins Japanese hobby dealer with an extensive model railroad section. Their shipping rates to the us are very reasonable.

[Viperjim1]

Model power also makes these as I believe life like also being they have merged with other companies search evil bay and you should find some or hit your local swap meet.

[robert3985]

I scratchbuild my signal heads as well as some of my signal bridges.  Traincat used to make etched bridges typical of several railroads and regions, but, to my knowledge he is no longer selling, which is a real shame.

I eventually am going to have train detection and signaling on my modular layout, but haven't got that far yet, but there is room inside my sheet brass signal heads for three separate LED's...however, this hasn't stopped me from building and placing the signals where they prototypically are on my model railroad since I model actual locations.

Just to add a bit of "zing" to them, I put three little blobs of Blue Tack reusable adhesive (about the size of pinheads) behind the empty holes where the LEDs will eventually go, then press in red, amber and green MV lenses. 

Since I'm big on photographing my layout, this gives the effect most of the time that the signal is lit...all three lights!  I Photoshop out the lights I don't want for a particular photographic scenario, and it looks pretty good in my estimation.

Here's a photo of a modified Traincat U.P. cantilever signal bridge (etched brass kit) that I put together for my friend Nate's layout, showing the MV lens glowing from just ambient light.  A nice effect for photography IMO....



Here's a closeup of my scratch built cantilever signal bridge with an MV lens stuck in the "Type-D" signal head with no Photoshopping...



When I want 'em to light up, I use a fill flash so they'll "pop" for photos.

Here's a photo of a prototype "Type-D" signal head on the U.P. in Echo Canyon Utah on the Weber Grade.  Note that the lenses are white and show no color until they're lit...which will be just right when I get around to wiring up the LED's.



Could be that on older signal head innards, if the lamps were incandescent, they had colored lenses.  That's a detail I don't know, even though these type of signal heads have been on this stretch of U.P. mainline since 1926 (but without the big "Blizzard Hoods" or "Darth Vadar Hoods" as they're called nowadays) when it was finally double-tracked, with several center-sidings and ABS control. I assume (maybe incorrectly) that the lights have been upgraded periodically as the state of electronics improved.  However, the towers, bridges and signal heads didn't get replaced until starting about 7 years ago through today. Interestingly, what caused the cantilever bridges to need replacing was that the concrete footings had deteriorated...not the metal bridges.

So...MV lenses work good for me until I get around to actually lighting my signals.

Bob Gilmore

[randgust]

I recently retired all my bulb-holding NJI signals, which looked good until you put a scale-sized LED signal anywhere near them.  Then it quickly started looking worse than Lionel.

The "Santa Fe System Standards" book has plans for virtually every signal in there to confirm dimensions.  There is not a uniform mast height, but there is a basic 'rule of thumb' that the prime display is at least at engineer's eye level and then goes up from there.   More displays = taller signal.   

Those look OK, but the target heads are noticeably narrow.  Out of the box it may be as close as you can find.  Better than Bachmann.

For many years the best dummy signals out there were Sunrise, period, pretty much extinct, but watch for them on auctions and swap sites.

If you find yourself putting in a lot of work to make dummy signals look better, seriously consider looking at the Tomar signals; out of the box they are about as good as I could find, and the tri-color LED's for target displays are darn good.   All my signals 'work', but they are a combination of fixed-display, and interlocked with switches and a direction-of-travel toggle set by the dispatcher.   No detection.    But nothing, absolutely nothing, brings a layout to life any quicker than lit signals.  Other than headlights, it's a 'sign of life' that's difficult to top.

If you look at what you'd spend in time and effort to modify a dummy signal, vs. putting down the 'right' signal (even if it's not lit yet) it may be worthwhile to do the new LED ones.  There's a lot of options now.  I never thought I'd see the day where you could put an 'out of the box' LED signal in N scale with a twin-tricolor target so that you could have a proper 'diverging clear' and 'restricted clear' indication, but you can.

I've used some of the home-brew etched parts from members here as well as Tomar heads to make exact models of specific signals, and put Tomar heads on signal bridges, that's the 'state of the art' on my layout now, but that's evolving forward from dummy signals to NJI bulb signals, and now this level.

BLMA has etched-brass target heads that I've used and they can be converted to 'hot' LED use as well.

This is a Tomar tricolor signal head mounted on a plastic NJI bridge kit.  By buying the tricolor heads from Tomar I was able to convert a lot of my older units like this one to much better quality.  But the time to at least mount LED's may be a long time before you ever wire them in, just think about it, because the work of putting in LED heads is not much more than what you're contemplating.

 

[Bart1701]

For Bob Gilmore - Would you happen to have a non-photoshopped photo of one of your signals that have all 3 lights showing with the MV lenses on them? I also use Photoshop quite a bit, and thought if I took pictures with signals in the them that I would make sure to only have one lamp "illuminated" - either by eliminating the unneeded colors (if I had all 3 colors displayed on the signals) or by "painting" in the correct color in Photoshop (if I only had one color showing and the photo called for a different color to be lit).

I agree that in real life, you would not see any colors except for the lamp that is illuminated. I considered making all three colors visible ( in a muted fashion) so that my non-railroad friends might better understand how the signals worked. There is quite a bit of stuff on my layout that is not 100% prototypical ( autos that never move, autos without drivers, passenger cars without passengers, Code 80 rail, etc.) - so it's possible that the signals may stray a little bit from reality. 

I appreciate everyone's thoughts, and still need to make up my mind about how I want to do the signals. Still don't know which way I want to go....

Thanks,
Bart

[randgust]

If you could still get dummy signals that looked better than working ones, I'd agree, even if that took kits like Sunrise to do it.  But now, with the micro LED's, you can get some really decent-looking signals at reasonable prices that look better than most plastic dummy signals.   

It also has a lot to do with how many you need, really.    On my layout I have three double-track bridges with multiple aspects, a cantilever, and about four mast signals, two of which are pretty much scratchbuilt.  That's not very many.   I'd probably feel differently if there were a lot more. 

I'd always powered my signal lamp system from DC, and developed simple diode boards so that if you changed a single toggle on the dispatcher board, you could control direction of travel on a main track.  One way on the toggle is a 'red override' power feed to the diode matrix that turns every signal against the direction of traffic red - red.   The other toggle position on the track is what I'd call 'conditional green', it feeds basically through a series of interlocking contacts on the under-the-table switch machines to come up with the proper signal indication - including red indication if a trailing point main line switch is set against you, etc.  With dual-aspect searchlights you can come up with the various diverging aspects now.

That makes the signals very useful, the only thing that doesn't happen is that they don't drop to red as a train passes, but on a relatively small layout that's really a large double-loop with double track, that's not much of an issue to me.   Each main line really only has about six power blocks per track anyway.    So the degree of difficulty is far less, along with the expense.   

Just another approach, if you'll pardon the pun.

[robert3985]

For Bob Gilmore - Would you happen to have a non-photoshopped photo of one of your signals that have all 3 lights showing with the MV lenses on them?....

Thanks,
Bart

Hey Bart...

I've looked through my photo files, and I don't.   I'll take a couple tonight.  The vast majority of model railroad photos I take, I use Helicon Focus for my depth-of-field, then after I get a good result by combining the stack, I Photoshop the result and delete the stacks since there are up to as many as 40 hi-def photos per stack, and they take up a LOT of room in my hard drives.  I used to keep a large and a small "shopped" file of every model railroad photo, but nowadays I only keep a large one on my HD and at Picasa, since when I "share" from Picasa I can determine the quality (size) when I post it.

Bob Gilmore