Points and signals at Foligno, 1990

Deutsche Version dieses Postings

Here are a few photos from Foligno, where we spent four or five days:

Barrier motor, Foligno, May 1990

Italian electrical points lock their blades inside the points machine. This is typical for most countries, with the exception of a few central European ones like Germany, Switzerland and Austria, where the blades are locked to the stock rails directly at the tip of the point (however, this seems to change in recent installations in Austria):

Points machine, Foligno, May 1990

The following picture, on the other hand, shows a set of points without any blade locks. For the normal position, a key lock asserts that the blade is kept at the stock rail; for the reverse position, the points have to be traversed slowly:

Points without blade locks, Foligno, May 1990

Here, one can see the lock mounted to the right stock rail:

Lock, Foligno, May 1990

Italian signals are placed to the left of the track. Frequently, they are placed on gantries or signal bridges. The triangles below some signals indicate a slow route over diverging points:

Starting signals, Foligno, May 1990

Finally, here is a picture of a typical Italian locomotive with three bogies:

E636 038, Foligno, May 1990

Electro-mechanical interlocking at Ciampino, 1990

Deutsche Version dieses Postings

This is one of the merriest photos around signalling equipment that I have ever taken:

Interlocking and traffic director, Ciampino, May 1990

The frame is an electro-mechanical interlocking or, in Italian parlance, an "apparato centrale elettrico" (A.C.E.). More precisely it is called "apparato centrale elettrico a leve individuali", i.e., "interlocking frame with individual levers"; with the longer abbreviation A.C.E.L.M., meaning "apparato centrale elettrico a leve manuali", because A.C.E.L.I. is taken by interlocking frames with buttons. Term like "central apparatus" have been used in many languages to designate interlocking frames, among them in German, Swedish and, here, Italian.

The colours used on this lever frame ("banco di manovra") are, according to this Italian webpage:

• black for points levers and points locks levers;
• blue for route levers;
• red for stop signals;
• yellow (or actually orange) for distant signals.

On this picture, a route from Velletri into track I has been set up—on the far right, one can see the pulled levers of the home and distant signals:

Interlocking frame, Ciampino, May 1990

This picture shows the track and signal panel. Occupied tracks were indicated by a dark light strip (in contrast to modern electrical frames in most countries, were—typically red—lights represent occupied tracks). The advantage of this old technology was, of course, that burnt??? lamps would not compromise the safety of the system (more modern frames use multiple lamps, where the probability that all of them fail is negligible).

It is interesting that this panel is, as of today, still shown in the official training documents for these frames provided by RFI (Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, i.e., the Italian railway infrastructure provider) on page 36:

Track and signal panel, Ciampino, May 1990

Unfortunately, I took only these few photos at Ciampino (and I wonder how I got the permission to take the photos at all; some waving of hands and much smiling must have been part of the exercise). A final picture shows starting signal DN at track I, where we left Ciampino:

Starting signal DN, Ciampino, May 1990