The GW had to be different, of course, and remote distants were commonly normal semaphore arms operated by battery motor.
There were ones on the Up lines approaching Taunton station, outer homes (the inner homes were on the big gantry further ahead that appears in so many photos) were operated by wire from the Station West Box. The distants underneath were for the East Box, beyond the station, and were operated by battery, slotted, with the mechanism at the foot of the signalpost.
In clearing them, the Home signal would slam down with a resounding Bang! audible some way away. When East Box pulled off the distant it would very slowly and judderingly, presumably dependent on the state of charge of the battery, take the best part of 10 seconds to go down. Once the train passed the Home would snap back up with equal noise in a moment, while the distant would very slowly return. Friend managed to get a photo of the "impossible" at that moment, with the Home at danger and the Distant underneath at clear.
GW IBS signals used the same approach.
Yet another type was a searchlight signal where the moving coloured spectacle plates are operated mechanically by a wire from the box.
The LNER was an early user of these, initially imported from the USA. Some, especially on the GE electric lines, lasted until recently. They are operated with a U-shaped slide mechanism with the 3 coloured lenses in it, green at one end, yellow at the other, and red in the middle. The aspects are operated by a single pair of electric wires, a positive current pulls the green into position, negative makes it go to the opposite end and show yellow, and appropriate balance weighting of it means with no current it falls to the middle red position.
When TPWS came along a simplistic solution was to attach the operating mechanism to this U-shaped mechanical slide. Unfortunately whoever did the design didn't quite think it through, and early implementations saw the issue that where trains were following one another closely on yellows, it might clear on to green just as the train was passing. The slide would be changing from one end to the other, passing the red on the way, and if the train happened to be crossing the grids at that precise moment it would see the momentary red and get an emergency stop. I believe there had to be a complete redesign of the approach to overcome this.