Antique Railroad Lanterns and Lamps

In the days before city lights and GPS, railroad lanterns served a very important purpose: they communicated signals at night between trains and stations. Sometimes, a timely lantern was a life-or-death illumination. According to one romanticized 19th-century story, a 15-year-old girl named Kate Shelley saved the Fast Atlantic Express from a broken bridge by alerting a station agent, whose lantern signal to the train averted disaster. In...Continue Reading