The Wig Wag at Delhi! скачать в хорошем качестве

The Wig Wag at Delhi!

http://www.yardlimit.com 34 miles south of La Junta, CO along highway 350 is the town of Delhi. Yes, that’s how it’s pronounced. To call it a town is being generous. There are a couple abandoned buildings and maybe a small ranch house. The road between La Junta and Trinidad is so sparsely traveled that people wave at each other. On June 7th we went to La Junta where there’s a crew change point for Amtrak and a small BNSF yard. Almost all of the BNSF traffic goes northwest to Pueblo, but Amtrak takes the lonely track down to Trinidad before going over the Raton Pass. The next day we set out a few minutes before Amtrak 3 was due to arrive in La Junta, giving us time to get to Delhi and set up the cameras to catch the last surviving wig wag crossing signal in Colorado and New Mexico. Almost two hours went by before I finally heard Amtrak 3 tell the Trinidad Dispatcher that he had left La Junta at 1004 am, almost an hour later than I expected. Of course, out in the middle of literally nowhere, there’s no cell service so I had no way to get Amtrak updates. It turns out that there was a trespasser incident between Lamar and La Junta. Long before the crossbucks and alternating red lights had become standard at railroad grade crossings, there were different means of attracting motorists' attention to the very real but too often unseen danger of a train approaching. A sensible solution by Albert Hunt, a Pacific Electric technician, decided that mimicking a crossing guards' lower half wave with a red lantern, then the railroad's universal indication to stop, would be the simplest and mechanically easier than a lot of other options. The gantry mounted wig wags were supplemented by other mounts, usually a pedestal in the median or off to the right of the lane approaching the crossing. The pedestal mounted a counter-weighted target with the box upside down, causing the target to wag like a person waving for attention. The signals were deemed obsolete in 1949 when the now-common alternating red lights and crossbucks were standardized. Nevertheless, the ones in place since then have been wagging like the family dog for every train that crosses their stretch of rail. While there doesn't appear to be a conspiracy afoot to remove these arcane contraptions, the number of active signals is dropping fast. The relative quiet of the original Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway route through Colorado's southeast and over Raton Pass allowed semaphore signals to remain in place for years. That same quiet allowed the wig wags to survive as well, until the last decade. Wig wags at Manzanola and Rocky Ford have been retired, leaving a lone survivor in Delhi. Each day, Amtrak's Southwest Chief hustles by at track speed, one train in each direction, and precious little else. The rest of the day is reserved for quiet observation with cars and coyotes, along with the occasional antelope. Make sure you hit that like button and subscribe to Yard Limit! http://www.corailroads.com/2016/01/la... #Delhi #wigwag