What in the world do classification lights do for a living??
Paraphrased from RIGHTS OF TRAINS, Peter Josserand’s exhaustive treatise on railroad rules in pre-radio TTTO days.
Classification lamps (and classification flags, during daylight) are used in the following circumstances:
When a scheduled train is operated in two or more sections, all but the last section shall carry green flags by day and green lights by night.
An extra train, not listed on the employee timetable, shall carry white flags by day and white lights by night.
A train operating on timetable authority, either alone or as the last section of a multi-section movement, shall not carry flags. At night, the classification lights shall remain dark.
Some railroads operated all their freights as extras, while others ran all but work trains to schedule. I did read in one reference that Norfolk and Western had four scheduled freights in each direction on the Shenandoah Valley route. During 1942 they ran as many as ten sections of each. If that’s where you’re at, better put some green flags on your Y-6.
Chuck.
Don’t forget, many roads had red classification lights to mark the ends of trains.
Nick
We use miniature flags on one of the layouts I operate on. The owner has drilled holes in the appropriate locations of his diesels and put small flag stand tubes on his steam locomotives to hold them.
This way we can get the same information a real crew would just by looking at a passing train. Pretty useful if you’re running under timetable and train order rules…
The lights on the rear of a train are markers, not classification lights.
Definition, again from RIGHTS OF TRAINS:
Train: A locomotive, or locomotives, with or without cars, carrying markers.
Chuck.
While technically not classification lights…red lights were part of the classification light cluster on many diesels.
And I didn’t say rear end…I just said end. It was common practice on Conrail to leave unattended engines sitting with the headlamps off and red lamps displayed.
Also, while again not technically class lights, engines in helper or push pull service often needed red lamps. Although, a dimmed headlight also services this purpose.
Nick
Thanks, does this go for the same idea for the lights on the side of the nose of some diesel locomotives?
Yes.
Brad
An engine could need both class lights and markers fore and aft. A diesel moving by itself from one terminal to another as an extra movement at night would have to have white class lights showing in front (indicating it’s an extra) and red markers on the rear.
Well and it probably wouldn’t hurt to have it’s headlight on of course. [:I]
Conrail engines could show only red on their lights so they would be marker lights only, not classification lights.
That is correct for the newer engines, but the older Conrail units have/had lamps capable of displaying white, green and red.
Nick
If you’d ever climbed inside the nose of an ‘E’ unit or an ‘F’ unit as I have, you’d have seen colored glass filters behind those clear class light lenses. These were mounted in a metal bracket so they could be flipped down to change the class light color to green (last section of a scheduled train) or RED for running lite in reverse, serving the function then of a marker !
The older CR units with three colors may have been ex NYC. PRR units had red only even on late steam engines. Mark
New built Conrail units for the 70s and 80s had the same feature.
Nick