I thought I’d share a little addition to the fascia–Southern whistle posts. I never thought about this on my last layout because none of my locomotives were sound equipped. Now that I’m moving toward sound, I wanted a way to tell crews when they need to sound the horn for grade crossings. On the prototype, posts are set up on either side of a grade crossing to give the crew enough time to sound off their loooong, loooong, short, looooooooong blast of the whistle or horn. While most railroads used a white sign with a prominent “W” for this purpose, the Southern used a vertically elongated white sign with a stripe, a stripe, a dot, and a stripe (for long, long, short, long). I decided I wanted my posts to be Southern-esque, so I created a simple black-and-white version from basic shapes in MS PowerPoint, sized them to about 1/2″ high, and printed them on a label sheet.

I cut them out and placed them about 15-18″ from the sites of future grade crossings (I have no roads modeled yet) which gives crews about 4-5 seconds of warning at 10 scale MPH, probably about right for the areas where these grade crossings reside. After placing the whistle post stickers on the right side of the track diagram (making them horizontal), I added a little 1/2″ piece of 1/32″ white graphics tape representing the post for the sign to ensure operators can tell which direction the sign is pointing. Once I have scenery, I’ll add some real scale whistle posts trackside, but for now, these will give crews one more prototypical thing to remember while operating their trains.