The Erie's signal gantries were works of art in themselves, almost Victorian in their ornate elegance. This gantry at HO Tower north of Elmira, New York would have originally held semaphores, but the searchlight signals that replaced them were memorable in their own right, especially at night when semaphores tended to be on the dim side. Those specially focused searchlight lenses could literally be seen for miles. HO Tower was, of course, where the Pennsylvania's Elmira Branch (which had used Erie rails through Elmira) split off onto its own rails again to continue north to Sodus Point.
