Thanks for the detailed report — you'd found a real bug. The placer entity wasn't
being cleaned up when the base spawned on a different rail layer, which is why one
of the two signals couldn't be removed.
Fixed in 0.6.0: overhead poles now refuse to place on elevated rails entirely
(the item is refunded with a message), since the overhead network doesn't support
elevated track yet. If you have leftover broken poles from 0.5.1, run
/ret_rewire_all in the console after updating — it cleans up orphaned pole parts
across the whole map. Proper elevated rail support is on the roadmap.