Yes, Sam, you speak of men with much seniority–they obviously knew the road and what they could do–and what they had better not do for safety’s sake. Sitting in the middle seat of the cab and blowing for the crossings as long as I could tell a whistle post from a milepost (same shape), I trusted the engineer’s judgement. As it was, we made up very little of the time that had been lost before we left Memphis. There were some crossings that are so close together that it was impossible to blow a proper signal for each crossing; I would use the last blast for one crossing as the first blast for the next crossing–and the engineer did not correct me. The only fatality was that of a dog that tried to outrun us on the track.
Nine years later, I was going from Chicago to Fort Lauderdale, and woke up in the middle of the night on the ACL’s Bow Line–and it seemed that we were running faster than fifty-nine miles an hour in that dark territory.
The “Billups Crossing” was a the subject of a photo and caption in Trains in 2003:
“Railroad reading: Stop-Death-Stop - a unique grade crossing signal”
by Ellis, Ed - from Trains, May 2003, pg. 66 - 67.
[“Magazine Index” keywords: crossing ic safety signal }
Semper Voporo, I remember seeing these early in my career when I worked on the Pacific Electric. They were few and far between, but they were still in use in 1965 and for quite a few years after that