Vintage Railway Signal Lamp (NO BURNER)

R650

 Vintage railway signal lamp.

Can show yellow, blue and red light.

(NO BURNER).

18cm Front to back x 15cm Bottom x 37cm Height.

Out of stock

Description

Antique Railroad Lanterns and Lamps

In the days before city lights and GPS, railroad lanterns served a very important purpose: they communicated signals at night between trains and stations. Sometimes, a timely lantern signal meant the difference between life and death. In one romanticized 19th-century story, for example, a 15-year-old girl named Kate Shelley saved the Fast Atlantic Express from a broken bridge by alerting a station agent, whose lantern signal to the train averted disaster.

In the most basic sense, railroad lanterns have four components: a base, a wire guard (or cage), a chimney, and a glass globe housing the light source. The cage protects this globe from damage, but, even so, antique lanterns with intact globes are rare.

Lanterns can be divided into a few basic categories. The first is the fixed-globe lantern, the earliest type. These were most popular from the time of the Civil War to a few decades afterward. Most of those that have survived were used on railroad lines in the northeastern United States, which had older lines than other parts of the country

Additional information

Weight 1 kg