For more than a year, I have now been publishing texts and photos in German about Austrian railroad signalling and interlocking in the 1970s and 1980s. Along the way, I also started to add texts that describe current equipment, show signalling machines from other countries, or deal with general issues of railroad signalling. And because some people in the world might be interested in these texts, but are not fluent in German, I intend to translate some of the German texts to English and publish them here.
This blog will certainly contain much fewer texts than the original blog. However, if anyone is interested in a translation of a specific posting on stellwerke.blogspot.de, drop me an email: I'll try to post an English translation here soon afterwards.
A specific problem will be that there are many terms in railroad signalling that are specific to some "railroad signalling culture," so that there is no translation (or at least no commonly known one) for them. This is an interesting problem in itself, as I found out when reading a book on the installation of Westinghouse interlockings in Berlin, Germany, in the years 1913 and 1914 (see the remarks on "bypass" and "Umleithebel" in this posting on the installation of the type of Siemens interlockings in Vienna that succeeded the Westinghouse type). A well-known dictionary of railroad terms by Jörn Pachl is available in German and English, however, there are no translation links between the two. Moreover, many old terms have never been translated, as far as I know. Still, I will try to find suitable renditions ...
A last note: It might take some time until the first posting appears here (after this introduction), so please be patient.
It doesn't seem to want to give me the option to follow your blog. BTW you can check out mine here:
ReplyDeletehttp://position-light.blogspot.com/
Hi Mike -
Deletea) thanks for the link to your interesting blog! From time to time, I'll look into it (and others) and try to understand more of North American railroad practices and signals and interlockings!
b) I fiddled with comment and other settings of my blog - hoever, I did not find that button "allow followers" - I don't know what's wrong here. Can you try again?
Regards
Harald
Hi Harald
ReplyDeleteThank you for a very informative blog! It is difficult to find out about Austrian signalling in English.
I have an interest in Austrian narrow gauge railways, especially the Salzkammergut Lokalbahn. In pictures of the SKGLB there do not appear to be any signals, although it seems that trains did cross each other, and trains from Mondsee met the 'main line' trains at St Lorenz How, without signals, did they manage the traffic?
Many thanks, and kind regards
Nigel
(Answering "millions of years later" ...) I am quite sure there were no signals at all on the SKGLB. A typical mode of doing train crossings on narrow gauge lines was that one train would have the right to enter the station; from where it would "call in" the other train with its whistle when it was safe to do so (points set, no people on the tracks). The signal used was the Morse signal long-short-long for "K", meaning "Kommen!" = "come (in)".
DeleteH.M.