Form An Orderly Q, But There Is A Point To It..

Working alongside mechanical signalling is the dark art of electrical trickery. One vital part of this  is the railway safety relay. Relays of one sort or another have been used in vital railway signalling  circuits for over 125 years now and through long experience with older relays the present design, the BR930 miniature has become possible. I say a present design, it was the mid 1960’s when  they first appeared and are still manufactured and used in 2025 worldwide. Not bad eh? They might call them miniature, but they still weigh over a Kilo each.  

There’s now well over 200 variants of this relay depending on what function they are required to  perform. Thankfully we won’t need that many variants!

Westinghouse M3 Point Machine

We have been collecting, gathering, squandering, basically hoarding all the types of BR930  miniature relay, also known as Q type, that we will need including spares.  

Everything from track circuits, signal indications, motor points and interlocking controls will use  them in this project.  

Why not use an older type of relay more in keeping with the period of the signal box you might  ask? Well simply, the older types are scarce and if we did use them we’d be hard pressed to get  spares for them. These “new Q style” ones are now 60 some years old in design so I think that’ll  class as vintage! 

Q style signalling safety relay

Near the station platforms there are three track points that require to be worked by point machine  instead of being worked mechanically from the signal box. Although the points are well within the  maximum distance of 350 yards that mechanical points can be worked from a signal box, they are  situated awkwardly due to other fixed structures around the site which present obstructions to the  point rodding. 

Also there would be temperature compensation issues due to one half of the point rodding run  being in the shade of the workshop shed and the other half in sun. However this is Cumbria we  are in so sun might not actually be a problem..! Using point machines is a better option as they  eliminate these issues. Can’t do anything about the sun unfortunately. 

 

The relay nursery! 😆

I’ll do a separate blog about the point machines soon. Thanks for reading.

Comments

  1. Paul J21 February 2025 at 13:14

    Excellent progress being made, the work here is impressive. But on a slight technicality they the are BR930 spec miniature relays not Q style. Q style is only Westinghouse/Siemens versions. The picture is of a TY type of Tyres manufacture like Z style are GEC manufacture.

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