Re: Hi vis checking / colour blind drivers

If train drivers aren't allowed to be colour blind, how come car drivers are?

Traffic lights are red and green, yet red/green colour blindness is very common. Yes you can look at the position of the lights, but seeing a red light out of the corner of your eye is much much better.

Because road signals are green at the bottom, amber in the middle and red at the top, so not that hard to decipher which aspect is showing, you are also likely to be driving 1 ton of car with maybe 3 passengers at upto 70 mph, and able to stop in a couple of hundred yards at most if you get the signal colour wrong... you also have the ability to swerve around an obstacle if needs be.

Railway signals tend not to have a set pattern for the aspects, some can have just an amber and a green for distant signals, the main signal being the same kind of signal head, just with a red and a green aspect, there are a lot of modern multi aspect signals that have just one lens, led's change colour to show the aspect.... same with the red and green flags used by hand signal men, platform staff etc.

But when you get to the high speed lines with 4 aspect signals plus flashing aspects it gets a bit worse, The driver is also likely to be driving 3 to 500 tons of train with a few hundred fare paying passengers onboard, driving at upto 125 mph,

Drive at night and there's not much chance of deciphering which aspect is lit in a signal from it's position in the signal head even if traveling at

The red and green are the important ones, if you confuse them you crash. And just wait for some OCD freak in here to correct your yellow to amber.

I do it all the time. I never look directly at a traffic light. I see the colour in my peripheral vision while I'm looking straight ahead at the road like I should be.

In message , Rod Speed writes

Of course, when I were a lad, 'yellow' was called 'amber'.

Yellow, not amber.

As I've said, when I were a lad, it were 'amber'. I guess they changed the name to 'yellow' because a lot of people didn't know what colour 'amber' was.

PETER SELLERS - 'Balham - Gateway To The South' - 1958

And the earlier, but still circa 1958

Oops - that last one's a 1979 remake of the 1950's BBC Radio "Third Division" original.

the 1935 edition of the Highway Code calls it "Amber" - as does the current, 2007, edition. Mind you, in the current one, the printed version looks yellow to me.

The Highway Code never used to cover railway signals...

Signals for road traffic certainly have always been called amber in my experience.

true, but I suspect the signals were the same - to save confusion

That's the yanks predelection for shortening the alternative name of 'Amber', 'yellow orange', to just yellow. The wiki article explains it all:

The phrase "Don't be an amber gambler!" remains an entirely valid exhortation to minimise Traffic Light mediated RTAs to this day.

What on earth made them think of making lights without being in a set order? And what does the blue one mean?

Unless trains are a lot more complicated than cars, surely you only need the three colours, which could be placed in the same positions as traffic lights.