Another start

I might now start to translate a few texts of my blog in German to this site. The idea is that people around the world who are interested in mechanical machines, and especially railway interlockings, get something to see which they might not have seen or even known about up to now.

In order to keep my workload down, I will mostly write much shorter texts than in my German blog, but keep all the pictures. If someone is interested in more detail, she or he can drop me a line—then I might expand the text of the respective posting.

The types of interlockings used in Central and Eastern Europe have been quite different from those designed in  English-speaking countries. The main reason for this is that a few seminal inventions of Siemens (especially the Siemens block instrument), even though known and described in English engineering works, never found favour in England, ostensibly because they needed three line wires per bit of information; but also because of radical differences in the responsibilities of signalmen, linemen etc.

This "interlocking divide" can been seen up to this time when one looks into wikipedia articles describing interlockings or details thereof—almost no mention is made of the respective "other side". When I find time, I might change this (and look how the various specialsts react). For the moment, I will just describe in English the devices that I have photographed in the 1970s and 1980s in Austria and its neighborhood.

Still, the first few postings will contain recent photographs of

• my own interlocking frame(yes, I do own one!)
• a few very old interlocking frames in Germany.

Only after these texts, the documentation of Austrian interlockings will begin.