The Lake States Railway Historical Association offers copies of railroad photos on their site. Going through these photo collections is always interesting, and I have made a photo purchase. Recently I was going through the photos in the E.G. Baker collection and found some photos that really blew my mind. They show what appears to be a park near the Southern Railway train station in Lexington, Kentucky. In the "old days" railroads would enhance their stations with vegetation but I have never seen anything like that Lexington display. There was a large SR herald, probably at least 10' in diameter, laying on a hill side. There were large signs surrounding the herald announcing the Lexington location. But what REALLY got me is that there had to be at least 20 standing railroad signals scattered around the site. Many of these were semaphores but there was a couple of "banjo or Harp signals"(?), a depot train order signal and a double "high ball" signal. The date of the photos is 1941. My guess is that the Southern eventually withdrew their support for the park or, quite possibly, the metal in the signals (and the signs?) were "donated" to the war effort for scrap. I'll try to post one of the photos for the LSRHA site (with its "watermark") but not sure if it will be successful:

https://www.lakestatesarchive.org/EG-Ba ... -bfpqw6B/A

Anyway, this has to be a truly early piece of railroad artifacts preservation. Too bad it did not survive.

Les

I'll speculate that the park was across the tracks from the station, Les, but there's nothing left there now, including the station...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWLAsAXyucZjXvMk8

What used to be a sleepy residential area south of Lexington became valuable commercial land in the 1960's and the little park in the photo became active freight terminal land.

4501 excursions used to use that station area to board passengers. I remember standing their as a child with my grandfather watching 4501 go by, and later boarding an excursion there.

Shame if those signals were all destroyed.