One thing I will add to this is that NOBODY knows everything about the railway, even those who have been on 30+ years.
Not to say there are quite a few who think they do!
Quite right, the one day someone thinks they know it all on the railway is the day they set in motion their downfall.
There are plenty of gaps in my knowledge but I'd like to think I have the nous to know that it's important to ask the question when something new and unfamiliar and potentially important crops up.
If I was to drive a route that had two safety critical looking signs on it at a specific location and I didn't understand their meaning I'd make sure I found out what they were pretty quickly.
As it happens the signs in question appeared overnight several years ago and weren't publicised in any operating notices. They are not signs shown in the rulebook or sectional appendix, however the fact that the signs had suddenly appeared on a route where money seemingly couldn't even be found for PSR boards, and they appeared designed to be conspicuous, visible from a distance, positioned in a specific location (extensive vegetation had been cut back to position them where they were constructed) and that they were on the right hand side of the running lines where there happened to be three level crossings (two UWGs and one foot crossing with whistle boards) meant that it was obvious the right thing to do was to ask the question. For all any drivers knew at the time they might have been critical to wrong direction movements.
It is indeed true that 'nobody knows everything', however there are those people on the railway who just shrug and don't take responsibility for their own knowledge, and then there are those who use whatever means they can to dig and find answers. It sounds to me that the OP, being but a trainee at the moment, has a little more inquisitiveness than his DI because the trainee is the one on here asking the question. The DI by definition will have signed the route in question for several years as a minimum (whether Northern or TPE) but it is the trainee appearing on here asking the questions. As a DI you certainly can't answer every question your trainee might throw at you but any that you can't you should be able to find out the answer somewhere. When the boards appeared we asked our local management and we had an answer from Network Rail within a few days which was posted locally in our signing on point for drivers to digest.
@swt_passenger has it spot on. The boards were actually provided about five years ago on the up and down Main (as they were then known between Baguley Fold and Ashton Moss North Jns) as level crossing sighting boards for Moss Lane (FP), Moss Lane UWG and Jaum Field Farm UWG crossings in response to a risk assessment. Those three crossings were all in very close proximity to one another. A long standing TSR had been in force since 2011 reducing line speed on approach from 70mph to 40mph but clearly that hadn't satisfied the risk posed by vegetation obscuring the view of approaching trains for, and of, crossing users. In April 2018 when the line was extensively resignalled after a blockade the crossings were all abolished and two were replaced by footbridges, however the signs were never removed and remain there.
