Railroad signals are easy to ignore until somebody tells you that the odd arrangement of lamps beside the track may be the last surviving example of a system a railroad used for most of a century. RailroadSignals.us is built by somebody who notices.
Visit Railroad Signals of the U.S.
The site is a sprawling independent reference covering semaphore signals, searchlights, color lights, B&O color-position lights, Pennsylvania position lights, Norfolk & Western systems, unusual one-off hardware, signal aspects, and railfan guides.
It also explains the history behind the hardware.
Before 1900, American railroad signaling was far less standardized. Individual railroads developed their own practices, and even signal colors were not always what a modern observer expects. The site’s historical material notes that white was once used for clear and green for approach or slow—a system with an obvious problem if a colored lens broke.
Over time, many distinctive regional systems disappeared as railroads consolidated and standardized. Semaphores that were once common became rare. B&O CPL and Pennsylvania PL installations began vanishing. For a rail historian, the replacement of an old signal bridge is not just maintenance. It can erase a physical dialect of railroad operation.
The site preserves other vanished websites too
One particularly Ancient Web touch is the webmaster’s reconstruction of an old French-language Canadian railroad-signal site that disappeared. Rather than simply noting the dead link, he recovered what he could from archived copies and rebuilt the material as a service to other railfans, while explicitly crediting the original creator.
That is preservation stacked on preservation.
The site’s author has deep roots in the Baltimore Streetcar Museum community, joining in the 1960s and later helping create the museum’s streetcar logo and The Live Wire newsletter name. That history helps explain the tone of RailroadSignals.us: less polished institution, more lifelong technical memory made public.
The site also points readers to scanned railroad rulebooks and asks for contributions when information is incomplete. It behaves like a working reference rather than a finished exhibit.
For a modern webmaster, there is another lesson here. A specialized site does not need to cover transportation generally. It can document one class of hardware so thoroughly that everybody interested in that hardware eventually finds it.
As old signal systems continue disappearing beside active tracks, that narrowness becomes a strength.