Early traffic lights in Leeds

[Chris5156]

Which 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.

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.

[jnty]

Having said that, what did point duty officers do at night?

That 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.

Interesting 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.

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.

A fascinating story!

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.

[the cheesecake man]

and there is also the question of how you effectively communicate part-time traffic lights to drivers

A "part-time signals" plate?

[FosseWay]

and there is also the question of how you effectively communicate part-time traffic lights to drivers

A "part-time signals" plate?

Indeed, but despite the obviousness of that solution, we seem to be remarkably reluctant to use it!

[traffic-light-man]

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.

The 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.

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/

Some fascinating photographs there! The Birmingham example is particularly interesting with what looks like worded aspects separate to the main circular aspects.

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.

[FosseWay]

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<<.