Railroaders place to shoot the shit.

Neither did the IC.  Last of the cool locomotives.  The old Conraill ones are my favorite.

Happiness is getting a new Ferromex engine and accidentaly placing the screen switch into Spanish and trying to figure out what the fuck the buttons mean...

Those IC SD70's are highly over rated.

No alerters? Still? 21st Century???

http://www.ntsb.gov/Pressrel/2007/070320.htm

...Also contributing to the accident was the lack of an alerter on the lead locomotive that may have prompted the crew to be more attentive to their operation of the train. Had the crew been incapacitated or not responded to an alarm, the alerter would have automatically applied the brakes and brought the train to a stop. The Board concludes that had an alerter been installed on the lead locomotive of the northbound train, it may have prevented the collision.....

As a result of it's investigation, the Safety Board made recommendations to the Federal Railroad Administration, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, CN and all Class I Railroads. Among the 8 recommendations are the following:

* That the FRA require railroads to ensure that the lead locomotives used to operate trains on tracks not equipped with a positive train control system are equipped with an alerter.

What Snippy said, and more.

The control stands and engineer seats are placed in such a way that instead of looking straight out the center of the front window, the seat is positioned away from the sidewall and you are actually looking straight at the portion of the cab wall that separates the windows. You have to sit in an awkward position in order to see straight out the window and after 100 miles you get stiff and sore.

To those accustomed to working on "real" EMD locomotives, such as the SD45 or the beloved SD40-2, mentally you are still conditioned to stepping out the front door and onto a battery box at the same level as the cab floor. Instead these things have a a couple of steps down. I damn near took a header one dark and shitty night last year because of this little feature. I read somewhere else on this forum the same complaint about stepping out the back of an SD70M-2 vs a Dash9. This is something that could affect roho guys like yourself, Uke, not just TY&E.

The air brake "gauges", such as they are, are all on a common screen. This isn't unusual, we all (I think) have been on locomotives that did away with the gauges and instead display all the information on a screen. Except for the ammeter and speedometer, that is the case here, but it is a lcd screen mounted on the control stand where the gauges should be. It takes a while to get your instrument scan dialed into this setup so that you can quickly see and interpret the data. Also because of its positioning, that lcd screen is very difficult to see when the sun is shining on it.

And the electric airbrakes are like nothing I have seen anywhere else. There is a keypad right below the automatic that you have to navigate with in order to do anything like change from lead to trail, leakage test, etc. With time and experience one could eventually figure out what you have to do and when to work with these things, but I only get to deal with them as anything other than a trailing unit once every couple of months.

They are good pullers, I'll give you that, they will get up and move, but they are not very user friendly.

Ive almost killed myself on those fucking SD70's countless times because of those fucking steps.