I am barely familiar with the signals in OpenTTD, and hearing that is not filling me with confidence. But it seems that signals can be ignored.
I don't know that you can ignore them, but in my experience (which might be skewed because I'm comfortable with OpenTTD signals) the fact that they're "path-like" signals means that in most circumstances all you really need to do is drag a line of signals down a track in the direction you want trains to go on that track.