Just picked this up. It’s the mechanism for an H2 signal. Hope to get some video of it in action tomorrow. These are neat, since they change aspect by moving colored lenses in front of the light bulb.
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Awesome!! Think you’ll be able to get it working?
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The mech does work. I can see the lenses moving. Bulb won’t light, need to see if it’s a bad bulb or something else.
It’s alive! Hooked it up to the 12v bench supply. You can see it defaults to red when the power is off to the terminals that determine the color, and switching polarity it shows the green and yellow. You can also see the relay in the (broken) plastic bowl underneath moving. You can also see the bounce when it changes aspects.
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How cool!! Looks like its failsafe position is red, and it requires power to change it to yellow or green?
Is it changed by electromagnets?
12vdc?
You gonna rig it up outside somewhere, maybe triggered by people passing by or…?
Exactly. With no power applied, it drops to red. You need power to move it to the other two positions. Its a cool design. They are nominally 10v circuits, but they run just fine on 12v. The windings are WAY overengineered.
I want to find a dwarf housing for this, and put it in the train garden somewhere.
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Looking in the back of the mechanism with the bulb holder assembly removed, you can see the colored lenses.
Don’t know what I expected, but short throw from one color to the other, and nice fail safe built in to it. Where did you find that, be cool to have one .
I agree Pete. Signal envy…
FWIW there’s often things like this on craigslist, but the thing there is you have to contact the seller and see if they’ll play ball on shipping. Some weigh a ton so prob not. Some are crazy expensive.
Sometimes just for grins I use Searchtempest.com to see if anything local is available. I’ve not met with success yet, but here’s some examples for east coast rr signal offerings. You can type in your zip code and see if you’re tempted by something nearby.
Cliff
I’m on several signal groups on FB, and this came up last week. Cost as much to ship it as the item itself, but its oversized and 35#.
That GRS signal in St Louis is a steal. It looks like an SA, which is GRS’s flavor of the H2.
And that PRR position light dwarf signal, too. Someone should grab both of those.
This is a great video showing how the H2 signal works.
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perfect explanations of exactly how they work. Always wondered, in my mind it was a big p bright bulb ad some sort of big lense that rotated into position with the 3 colors in a circle around the bulb and opening. this is much simpler and almost fool proof since it automaticly goes to red if power is lost
Bob, I contacted the guy with the 4-light dwarf, and he said 4 different guys from NJ were already on him for it, so thanks but farewell.
Neat and quirky signal though!
Not surprising. That was a steal.