Do The Locomotion: 207 Tons and 4,400 hp

How much fun is it to drive a locomotive? Not much. The machine has its eye on you, and headquarters has its eye on the machine from a distance. Every 2 minutes (every 30 seconds when the train is traveling faster than 50 mph), a big red caution light that reads “alerter reset” glows on the driver’s panel. The driver has 25 seconds to slap a yellow switch to affirm that he is indeed present and accounted for. If he doesn’t, the power automatically backs down and then the brakes come on—hard. This is the modern equivalent of the deadman throttle. The fear of the out-of-control train traces partly to the era in which engineers sat in the very nose of the train rather than farther back in what’s today called a safety cab. Up front, they would occasionally experience a mesmerizing vertigo brought on by the drivers’ eyes following each passing cross tie as it rushes under the cow- catcher. Lightplane pilots are prey to similar phenomenon, flicker vertigo, caused by looking at a bright light through idling prop blades.


The accountants in a railroad company hate hard braking, especially if it means replacing tracks scalloped by sliding steel wheels. But almost every day it happens somewhere in the country, typically at grade crossings. The biggest danger a loco crew faces, up there on the pointy end of the engine, is not the high-speed Casey Jones crash but the drunk in the pickup truck trying to weave through the crossing gates at three in the morning. “People think trains can stop like cars,” says GE product-line manager Peter Lawson. Clearly people are not thinking. It can take half a mile to panic-stop a loaded train.


Since four-bar crossing gates that completely block the road are roughly twice as expensive as the standard two-bar gates, railroad companies are loath to install them. Indeed, many rural crossings are still totally ungated, which means that a train has to stop so the driver’s helper can climb out and physically halt traffic. There’s nothing much a loco driver can do when approaching a gated crossing but blow the horn, particularly if he’s ballin’ the jack to stay on schedule. And with increasing numbers of municipalities passing no-horn-blowing-after-midnight noise-pollution regulations, even this weapon is being disarmed. Granted, a train weighing thousands of tons is going to turn even a 4-ton dually pickup into shrapnel, but the front end of a locomotive is not a nice place to be when the blast goes off.




The Evolution driver sits in a kind of glass cockpit, behind two large CRT monitors upon which he can call up some 30 different graphic pages of instruments, gauges, graphs and information, with a separate monitor for the helper. Every aspect of the engine’s health can be tracked, and GE monitors most of its locomotives remotely, via GPS and an OnStar-like link to the Erie factory. The telemetry will spot a fault and transmit data to the closest service shop, telling the technicians what the problem is. They will alert the crew to stop if the problem is urgent.


Toughest duty for a crew is not a zillion-ton coal drag two miles long. No, the worst kind of trip features a bunch of ungated crossings as well as car exchanges that require the drivers to constantly climb in and out of the train.


Can a sloppy driver abuse a $2 million engine? Not really, says Schell. “There’s nothing he can do to hurt it. We’ve got enough protection and warnings in place to protect the temps and pressures, the cooling water, the oil, everything. The only people who can hurt an engine are the railroads, by not doing the proper maintenance.”

Still, between each of the alerter resets, humans are in control, and they can lose control. GE’s short test track in Erie ends “in a pile of dirt and a nice old lady’s yard,” says Lawson, “which we’ve needed to landscape a couple of times.”