Do any RRs use binoculars for their engineers to watch further ahead to look at the track?
I’ve heard of railroad engineers using their own binoculars to catch the license number of that jerk who just ran through the crossing ahead of them.
Has anyone ever used binoculars as a passenger in the front seat of a moving car? I have on several occasions, and let me say that it is so disorienting that it is incredibly difficult to tell whether you’re even on the highway or not. Per my experience, a locomotive engineer who stares thru binoculars would become so screwed up he wouldn’t even be able to tell whether he was on a train or not. This is just my observation tho, and it’s possible that others may not experience the problems i had, but even at that, I would not recommend it it except for anything other than a short glance or two.
I know engineers who use them to see singals that are waaaay off in the distance, but mostly the weed weasles use them to watch us for rule violations.
It’s very hard to use binoculars on a moving locomotive, the movement and the vibration makes it difficult to focus. Now, lots of folks use them to seek out hard-to-see signals, even though the use of them was discouraged where I worked.
I remember my Dad talking about this, and the way he told may be just a Canadian thing. When you hired out you had to take a vision and a colour vision test. It was done under controlled conditions and that was that. You either qualified with, or without glasses. Using binoculars on the job was once a rules violation. I am not sure if this is still the way it is.
Bruce
There was a photo years ago in a Trains article, perhaps the River Wars article about the Cotton Belt/MoPac, of an engineer using binoculars to view a signal. If i recall, there was difficulty with the placement of the signal and backlit by sun.
ed
If the bouncing around in the cab makes binoculars hard to use get a set of the IS (image stabilization) type. Unfortunately a good pair of IS binoculars can cost over $1,000. They do work!
Someplace within the last year or so I read that it was a rules violation - at least on that railroad - for a crewmember to use binoculars. Not sure of the rationale for that prohibition except for distraction - other than maybe on the southwestern desert terrain portions of ATSF/ BNSF, several signals are often visible at a time, and it might be possible to get mixed-up on which one you’re looking at -so it’s something I’d check out before doing it. Or, perhaps in a Restricted Speed situation, someone might get “too clever by half” as use that as a justification for extending the “visible distance” in half of which they have to be able to stop safely. The other reasons such as observing an otherwise hard-to-see signal would seem to justify the use of binoculars in those limited circumstances.
- Paul North.
Even with IS binoculars, such as the Canon series, they don’t work well on a moving deck. They work reasonably well, say with a grade of B-, when hand-held in non-windy conditions on stable surfaces, but once you introduce a second order of movement, they tend to become much closer to useless.
I speak from experience.
Crandell