Clear to Slow

The Canadian Pacific Railway arrived in Calgary in the 1880s. At the time the community was nothing more than a few scattered buildings out there on the open plain. My, how things have changed. Today, the tracks splits the city of 1.3 million right in half. The crossing seen behind often gets backed up badly on a freight passing and is the last at grade in the downtown core.

Theses signals, just like those you see in traffic, have very specific meanings depending on what’s being shown. In this case the right most displays three reds and tells us a train on the track beside is to come to a full stop on reaching it. On the left the signal guards a parallel second track and displays two yellows on top with a red below. This arrangement is called “Clear to Slow” (in one book “Advance Clear to Slow”), meaning a train is to proceed but to approach the next signal at a reduced or controlled speed. So in other words advance cautiously. This is rule 409, or 409c depending on the rule book referenced. There’s a huge number of signal variations and this is but one.

That we see a light displaying a colour other than red on these particular signals tells us for certain a train is due soon – it’s complicated and even all red can mean a train’s approaching – but a colour, yellow or green in the mix, assures it. We waited for a time but had other things to do. Bet it made an appearance just after we left.

From the same spot…
Canadian Pacific Railway then and now – Downtown West End Calgary.

Short Subjects: reports that for any number of reasons are brief in nature. They might be updates to older articles, previews of posts planned or not yet published, brief snippets of things that don’t fit in anywhere else or subjects that are so obscure that information on them can’t be found. Or sometimes we just ramble on about Lord knows what.

If you need any more information on what we talked about here, by all means contact us!

Date of adventure: November, 2018.
Location: Downtown, Calgary AB.

The CPR tracks in downtown Calgary.

There’s a train due.