An upper quadrant motor-worked semaphore mounted on a 12ft doll that is cantilevered 5ft to the right from the top of an 18ft post. The semaphore can take 3 positions over the upper quadrant: horizontal (STOP), 45 degrees (CAUTION) and vertical (PROCEED).
Home and distant 2-position automatic semaphore signals appeared in NSW in the 1900s. Later (1920s?) a 3-position variant for use in areas with higher traffic densities started to appear. These were double-light semaphore signals where the lower light was a white-light lamp with a red/green spectacle arm or a 2-colour electric light in place of a distant semaphore. The semaphore had 3 positions but the 3 spectacles showed only 2 colours (red, green, green). By day, CAUTION was indicated by the semaphore at 45 degrees, while at night the light indication was green over red.
In the 1940s the 3-position single-light automatic signal started to appear both in new installations and in conversions of double-light semaphores. The middle spectacle was changed from green to yellow (red, yellow, green). The single-light signals still had a lower light, but only as a backup in case the semaphore's lamp extinguished.
If the signal was automatic, it was controlled by a nearby relay hut ('NSWGR automatic signal relay hut', kuid:368725:20070) in which track-circuit detections were converted into signal-motor instructions to set the semaphore position.
The signal has a black name board mounted on the pole with white characters aligned vertically. This board can be populated by the user via the Properties editor in Surveyor mode. Actual names used for these signals followed the format <single alphabetic line code (optional)><distance from Sydney Central to the first decimal place>. Line codes were only used in the Sydney and Newcastle(?) suburban networks where there was parallel running of different lines.