I think that’s what it boils down to - this was being handled entirely by local authorities who would have consulted with their local police and come up with different answers. It’s interesting how different their approaches were.Steven wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 09:50Which makes sense, but then Princes Square was a critical location in Wolverhampton city centre!
Granted, the difference in size between the two cities may have impacted on this, but perhaps it's just the difference between the risk averseness levels of the Chief Constable of Wolverhampton Police v that of the Chief Constable of Leeds Police - which may not be the way round people may think as there was certainly a police officer assigned as backup to the Princes Square lights - you can see them basically stood on a box underneath the original lights in the photo on the Wiki.
Early traffic lights in Leeds
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Re: Early traffic lights in Leeds
Chris
Roads.org.uk
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Re: Early traffic lights in Leeds
A fascinating story!Ross Spur wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 20:13Interesting case here from 1926 (reported on 14 January in Daily News London) which indicated that the police used lights to control traffic (at least at times). A motorist travelling through Mitcham had come across police directing traffic past a road obstruction. Passing the first time he was stopped by a policeman showing a red light. On returning two hours later he saw a different policeman showing a white light and took it that it meant to accelerate. He received a summons for dangerous driving.FosseWay wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 11:40That said, in the winter, the dark hours include periods when traffic will have been considerable. I know that traffic police tended to have reflective gloves, but I'd imagine that they'd have needed some kind of lighting to effectively regulate traffic in the dark, and to avoid being run over.
In court it was told that the first policeman had placed a piece of red paper over his lamp since he did not consider the white light to be satisfactory. He considered he controlled traffic more successfully this way. The summons was dismissed, with the Chairman of the Bench saying that there should be a uniform plan of signalling at night and he suggested that the right authorities should take the matter into consideration.
Arriving at a similar situation some years ago, we found a police officer waving a white light from side to side until they judged that we had seen them and could see hand signals using head lights, at which point we were directed through conventionally.
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Re: Early traffic lights in Leeds
Indeed, but despite the obviousness of that solution, we seem to be remarkably reluctant to use it!
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Re: Early traffic lights in Leeds
Some fascinating photographs there! The Birmingham example is particularly interesting with what looks like worded aspects separate to the main circular aspects.Bryn666 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 12:11The Wolverhampton installation was unique in that it was a four-way signal like the American type, and the signal unit that replaced it until the 1960s was the same. I agree it is likely that Leeds claimed the first "conventional" installation but Wolvo definitely had the first experimental automatic system.astondb9 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 11:06 You can see photos of the traffic lights in 1928 on this website: https://www.secretleeds.com/viewtopic.php?t=6490
The discussion concludes that Wolverhampton had the first automatic traffic lights on a trial, and they became permanent at a later date, but the Leeds ones became permanent first, making them the first "real" installation. Not sure if there is any truth to that, but it made it to the "History of Traffic Lights" Wikipedia page and several local news sites in the past.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4d/36/ab ... 9721b7.jpg
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy ... 94jMIrUjHo
Birmingham followed suit: https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/fea ... een-light/
The permanent version in Wolverhampton made use of four 'single face' lanterns arranged one on each side of the same post, I believe manufactured by Revo. The same lanterns were typically used after that in the more typical back-to-back or three way type arrangements, one pole on each corner.
The four way 'all-in-one-box' type signal heads seem to have been fairly popular right at the beginning, though largely being used for just two or three directions much like I've mentioned above. Both SGE and ATM offered these, along with the less common manufacturers, but they seem to have fallen out of favour rather quickly.
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Re: Early traffic lights in Leeds
SMT note:
We removed the inline pictures taken from the Secret Leeds site, which doesn't seem to be working at the moment, for copyright reasons. But the pictures can be seen on the Web Archive >>here<<.
We removed the inline pictures taken from the Secret Leeds site, which doesn't seem to be working at the moment, for copyright reasons. But the pictures can be seen on the Web Archive >>here<<.
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