Saw this railway signal post lamp on eBay and put in a bid of £31:75. A couple of days later I sat down to watch the last 5 minutes of the auction. It was at this point I noticed my cataracts had caused me to bid £3175. It was a scary 5 minutes hoping no one else with a similar issue had bid £30:00 and also missed the decimal point. Thankfully I only paid a few pounds over as the bids increased in the last minute of the auction. Lessons learned.
Stuart, I notice you've used a colon i.e. : instead of a decimal point to separate the pounds and pence. Would eBay accept the colon as an alternative to the accepted form (i.e. decimal point) or would it be ignored and your bid still seen as £3175 rather than £31.75. Just wondrin'...
David just checked and the colon is not an available option on the bidding touch screen. Just need to read twice before submitting a bid.
Haha, I had one of those moments a while ago, when you hit the place bid button it gives 3 options of bids you can hit in slight increments. I was watching a bid at under £20 hit the button just as it changed to around 60, luckily I was outbid, but there was no way I wanted to pay that much. Never again!!!
I have an almost identical lamp but marked M where yours is S. My burner is slightly different, in as much as there is a locking device that prevents the main wick from slipping down (at least, that's what it appears to be for). I learned that the lifting lid is opened when installed in a signal so that if it goes out, a thermocouple device senses the outage and sets an alarm off. Paraffin triggering electricity. Live and learn.
Derek. You are quite correct about the electrical circuit. If the flame extinguished the contacts would separate and it would fail safe. Another more simplistic indication could be given if the signal was in sight of the signal box. Some lamp housing boxes had a small window on the rear which would exhibit a white light to the signalman when the signal was cleared to show that the lamp was still lit. Also worth noting that the signal had a blue aspect when cleared. The yellow flame viewed through the blue aspect producing a green light.
