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Crossing Railroad Signage
By Bruce Amaro
The specialized nature of railroad signs regulated by specific rules that apply to only railway operations makes them appear unprofitable for the sign shops. The important thing is that they have to be constructed by sign builders who understand the regulations of sizes, shapes, colors, positions of features, and even lighting on the signs.
However sign makers can still get involved in railroad signage; but before getting started, one needs to realize that their over-specialization makes them more a project than a profit for sign shops.
For starters, railroad signs confuse everyone—even the people who build them. “I know what the usual colors red, green, and yellow are for,” says a sign builder from Power Parts Sign Company in Chicago, Illinois, “but we once built one with a purple color and that was new to me. I didn’t understand what that was about.”
In railroad parlance, “sign” sometimes means “signal” and a greater part of the rail systems uses signals with signs attached. As I just mentioned—confusing.
For example, railroad signaling device manufacturer Western Cullen Hayes (also in Chicago) constructs crossing gates as part of its product line. “We build them with bells, whistles, flashing lights, and anything else you want on there, but if the customer wants any signs built, we have that done separately,” says one of its employees. “We don’t build the signs; we just place them on the structure.”
Signs and signals control movement between railroads and highway and road traffic, movement along railways, movement in rail yards, and any condition of rail travel and safety. However, some railroad administrators don’t see signals and signs that interact with highway and road-travel as purely railroad signage. “I don’t consider signs at highway-rail grade crossings that govern highway vehicle movement over, across, or under the railroad to be ‘railroad signs,’” says William M. Browder, director of operations for the Association of American Railroads (AAR) in Washington, D. C.
To bring order to the railway sign system and address signs as a separate entity, the rail industry and its regulators break rail signage into two categories: mobile (also called “advisory”) and fixed.
Mobile signs transmit information from any location (usually while the train is on the move) and are used mostly by the train crew to send along information about the train. These advisory signs use the standard sign shapes (square, triangular, circular) and include text that gives directions or directs the flow and movement of the railway. Usually the signs use a single word to tell the crew what to do—for example, “slow” or “stop” (when approaching a dangerous or common area), “junction,” and “station.” The engineer also watches these signs for posted speed, which way the train will head at the next switch, or at what speed to approach and enter the next junction.
These types of signs are meant for the train crew and are mounted on the right-hand side of the tracks (at eight feet above grade level). “Signs intended to be seen by train crews were located on the right-hand side of the track at an engineman’s height—perhaps eight to ten feet—but some, like whistle posts, were lower,” says Dr. James B. Calvert, associate professor of engineering at the University of Denver in Colorado.
Fixed signs communicate a message from one place—over and over and over again. The public is most familiar with fixed signage. The most common we see are those displayed at stations, railroad crossings, junctions, and bridges.
It would help to understand a railway if you thought of it as a trucking company with authority to use its own tracks (roads) and thereby create their own signs. Railroads are private entities and make their own signs to operate their rail yards (their own private roadways). We see these railways mostly carting freight on the main public rails. However public railways like Amtrak are allowed access into and through these private yards. That makes the signage confusing.
But who decides that sign design gets buried in railroad administration because of this tangle between public and private way? While the private railways follow a regulated set of rules for their fixed signage, the public transportation railroads follow the federal Manual on Uniform Manual of Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) regulations. “I’m not aware of any railroad counterpart of the MUTCD for railroad signs,” says Browser. “The AAR leaves these signs and others to the individual seven carriers and Amtrak.”
To learn about railway signs is to learn their applications. The federal government, through MUTCD, “is currently examining the design of railroad wayside signage to determine the minimum requirements needed to ensure that signs can be read at normal operating speeds and environmental conditions and to provide a higher degree of consistency in railroad signage such as is accomplished in highway signs by the MUTCD,” said a recent federal study on railway ergonomics. According to a government project description, the study wants to “improve railroad operations by setting sign standards for readability at normal operating speeds; consistency of size, shape, color, and placement; (and) replacement characteristics.”
Fixed signals on a railroad have two basic design characteristics: (1.) appearance and (2.) indication of a sign’s meaning. Designers who make railroad signs define their sign work and the way in which the sign will be used in those two categories.
Meanwhile the speed limit signs are good examples of an advisory sign that also uses those two characteristics— appearance and indication. “They consist of a warning sign placed at a braking distance from the restriction, the sign indicating the beginning of the restriction, and finally the sign showing the end of the restriction,” says Calvert. “Track works may require temporary speed restrictions at any point, but these aren’t considered as mobile signals but rather as temporary fixed signals.”
Browder explains that the mobile or advisory signs might be considered the wayfinding signs of the railroad industry. Although procedures common throughout the industry are done in different ways or in different sequences from yard to yard, advisory signs explain, point, and confirm the operations at hand and describe safety procedures. “In each freight yard, advisory signs appear on railroad property to ensure safety of operations and provide information useful and necessary to employees and authorized persons on railroad property,” says Browder. “Most of the railroads represented by the AAR are private companies in the freight traffic business. Where freight railroads serve industries, signs can be co-mingled, but agreements with customers and others served require clear and consistent understanding of any signage. Amtrak, commuter rail, and rail transit on our properties bring the general public in as authorized non-trespassers and result in additional requirements for appropriate signs.”
For the railroads—and there are seven large Class One railroads and over 500 smaller railroads in the U.S.—safety and advisory signs populate the industry’s signage inventory. “Rules specify the form of the signs and the distances involved,” explains Calvert. “Other signs give notice of points of caution—such as whistle posts [often the black letter ‘W’ on a white background on a flat board], station one mile [either written out or the black letter ‘S’ on a white background], yard limits [often an equilateral triangle with its point down on a post, with ‘Yard Limit’ written on it black on white], and a stop sign [usually rectangular white on red, placed at crossings with another railroad].”
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