Dumping pig slurry to make cars skid, nup, too pongy for me.
Some mongrels hurled a roo out onto the track up the top during the race one year.
They had caught it in the bushland behind Skyline.
I forget if "skippy" survived, but it apparently caused some dramas during the race.
The joy rider helicopters are the things that annoy me and the bodgy budgie during the races.
All the same we can do without petrol heads, way too many of them infest our highways here.
Steve.

Well semaphore signals belong to the era of Absolute Block - which is a time when there were signal boxes everywhere. Sometimes there were 3 or even 5 boxes at one station alone, if the traffic was intense.

Because of the mechanical force required to move the cables or links, there is a limit to how far away a signal can be. Distant signals were the worst of course. One reason for the lack of women in the job originally is that in some boxes you had to be very strong just to pull off. I'm told that a lot of it was technique, but they're still damn heavy.

Network Rail has for some time persued a policy of shutting boxes and installing colour light signals, which can be controlled from a far away 'hardened bunker (which they call a Signalling Centre).

But there are still some boxes remaining on quieter lines, waiting for the day that in-cab signalling makes physical signals unnecessary. Downham Market near me is a typical hybrid. It has Colour Light Signals for the running lines, but has kept a few semaphore shunt signals that are only used occasionally. It's not ecomically viable to convert them to LED Ground Position Light signals.

All my career I've been lucky enough to work exclusively on Track Circuit Block signalling, but I'm told that about 40% of the network is still Absolute Block, and many of these have retained their semaphores.

Hope this makes sense, BW

Thanks BW, signals can be heavy, a railway man told me everything is heavy on the railway - except the wage packets.

Yep semaphore signals are heavy.
I still crack up each time that I view the flick The Ladykillers.
Towards the end when the battle on the signal gantry occurs and the signal arm drops snotting the bloke (Alec Guinness ?) on the head and he tumbles down into the four wheeler open truck below.
Crikey, been a while since I last viewed it, might hafta drag out the DVD and spin it up.
Steve.