Today A friend of mine arranged me a visit inside the cab of a diesel.
What an experience!!!
The engineer knows the guy , so he left the loco and let the two of us in (there was some other guy inside but he was bussy doing nothing and staring through a window).
The locomotive was EMD GT22HW, which is international equivalent of GP39 but with A-1-A trucks, air conditioning and HEP.
here is a picture, this is not mine, just an example of the locomotive
What a machine!!! The controls feel so real when you touch them (probably has something to do with the fact that they ARE real) and not cab images in a train simulator. The control stand is shaking too much, at least it does in Idle.
The chair is nice, sort of like your avarage home computer chair.
The train was a passanger train waiting to depart in a station so we couldn’t do anything (like change notches) with the controls, but I did sit and touch every thing I saw 
Love the sound from inside the cab (turbocharged 645 12-cylinders)
Really a great experience. This guy that gave me this opportunity (he is 20 like me) knows most of the local engineers and they had let him drive locomotives many times. Boy is he lucky. He said he’ll try and arrange a cab ride (this was just a cab tour), I hope he can.
Again not my picture, but an example of how the cab looks like.
What’s your story about the first time you entered a locomotive cab? And which locomotive was it?
Outstanding. I still smile everytime I think about the SD45 I got to notch out. Cab rides are awsome!
Adrianspeeder
Cool deal electro, hope you get your cab ride. You’ll forget all about the lowly tour after that.
I think the first time I was in a cab was railfair 91’ and was AT&SF 554, a new B40-8W.
But it also could have been a tunnel motor that I was invited into around the same time. I can’t remember which was first. They are so different that each time seemed like the first. Of course that doesn’t count all the dead steamer cabs I’ve been in, mostly at Travel Town in Griffith Park.
Sweet deal Electro. Not a bad looking unit, either. I’m kind of partial to the old Geeps (though I never ran into many GP-39’s), but this isn’t a bad looking unit at all.
Hope you get your cab ride soon. My first cab ride was actually in a Chinese Mikado over at the Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad. Got to run out to the High bridge and back when they blew down the boiler.
My first cab ride was… wait…
haven’t had one yet (sigh).[:(]
Thanks guys. Chances I’ll first get a ride in a DMU, then later on maybe in this diesel
I’ve been in a few locomotive cabs, but the first cab ride I had was in a knackered Plymouth switcher. While the ‘engineer’ was doing a reverse move, he got out, and let me run it “until the fuel ran out.” This is a 3-foot guage diesel that the museum uses to pull their steamer (Waynesburg & Washington RR #4) out of the enginehouse. The Plymouth uses a straight-six engine with chain drive. It was like driving a big truck
The second cab ride, was in a B23-7 (I think) on the New Castle ¶ Industrial RR. Let me tell you when you’re going over a bridge, and looking down from that height…holy cow!