Railways: History, Signalling, Engineering

See the new articles on French, Belgian and German signalling.

For information on telegraphs and railways, please refer to Telegraphs. For an explanation of the animated signals at the right, Click Here.

Photographs of Signals

These photographs concentrate on historical and mechanical signalling, though some light signals are included. The files require so much storage space that American, British, and Continental photos will be rotated at intervals through the year. The active link show the photos that are currently online.

American Signals

British Signals

Continental Signals

Typical Signal Aspects

Pennsylvania Railroad Position-Light Signals

Three-Arm Color-Light Signals

Phantom Aspects The Sun gets in light signals

Operations and Safety

Signalling In Europe

Railway signalling in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Austria has many similarities to American and British signalling, but many interesting differences as well. Information is not widely available in English, so this section is intended to correct this deficiency. Most of the information comes from original sources in French and German, and the emphasis is historical.

Signalling in America and Britain

The Beginnings of Railways

Railway Civil Engineering, Historical and Current

The Second Section

The articles in this section are stored in another dirctory than my usual HTML directory to obtain additional disk space. These articles include those that appeared on my English website of a few years ago, that I think might be interesting to make available again.

Electric Railways

Interurbans in the U.S.: electric railway technology.

Links to other railway and signaling sites: