Uploaded January 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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A lot of folks are interested in why railroad signals are red, yellow, and green so I did a bit of research to see if I could dig up an answer form you. So in today’s video we’re going to take a loom at what I found. I also need to tell you that most of the photos and images I used are from the wikipedia website on Railroad Signals of North America and are provided under the creative commons usage agreement. I highly recommend this site for a general overview and you can find it at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_railroad_signals . For a deeper dive into this subject I recommend railroadsignals.us and mikeroque.com .

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:40 Ball Signals
3:34 Reading Moving Vanes
3:57 Smashboards
4:40 Semaphores
6:18 Banjo signals
6:57 Post 1900-Dr. Churchill
9:35 Red-shift
10:48 Target signals
11:42 Triple aspect
13:33 Wrapup