Approx. when where automated crossing gates first used?
The first ones were installed in my hometown around 1950, but they had undoubtedly been used in other locations long before that.
I’ve seen videos of World War II era trains with automated crossing gates.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about crossing gates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_crossing
My Lionel train layout had one prior to WW II LOL
Bob
I can’t speak for true gates, but Wig Wags were in since I believe the 20s. It’s not to dissimilar a mechanism. The gates are tripped by a short in the rail, which could have been done at any point after edison and Stepheson put their inventions out.
Wigwags began to be installed about the time of WWI, first on Pacific Electric in 1914. Installation of new ones was prohibited shortly in the late 1940s, but previously-installed ones were grandfathered.
Mark
A wig-wag is a crossing signal, not a crossing gate. [:)]
The film/video could be misleading because there was an interim stage between manual crossing gates, where you had a guy in a shanty at track level who came out and lowered the gates, and fully automated gates. In this in between stage, the gates were powered (usually pneumatically from what I understand) but were controlled by a guy in a nearby elevated watch tower. So it could appear that the gates came down ‘automagically’ but in fact were triggered by a RR worker who might be out of the picture.
In 1951 I was six and lived for awhile in Long Branch NJ. I used to somehow get over to a crossing that had human controlled gates. There was an elevated tower. The guy would come down and talk to us kids sometimes. It was GREAT!.
Ed
The current issue of NorthWestern Lines (CNW Historical Society) has a pic of a manual-hydrolic gate system being used in 1953 IIRC (should have written it down when I was looking at it) in Highland Park Illinois. The author has some good information in the article and mentions something like “the manual gates were there replaced about X years after I started visiting the station” but unfortunately he never says when he started visiting there, so you can’t pin down an exact date.
To answer your question go: www.railroadsignals.us/basics/timeline.htm they will tell you more than you want to know.
Automatic warning devices (bells, flashers, gates) first appeared in the 1910s on an experimental basis. The technology was perfected in the 1920s but very few systems were installed because they were expensive. Widespread use began in the 1930s as the cost of the equipment declined and the public concern over grade-crossing collision fatalities increased. A collision between a school bus and a D&RGW freight train at Midvale, Utah, on December 1, 1938, was at that time the worst motor-vehicle accident in the U.S. in terms of fatalities; 23 children and the school bus driver were killed. Subsequently, laws were passed creating funding mechanisms to install grade-crossing warning devices.
RWM