safety cabs - Trains Magazine

thatweirdwriterdude

what do you mean by "safety cabs" could you explain it a bit more?

What he means directly is cab structure that conforms to the requirements of AAR standard S-580 as amended.  By extension this includes many of the current 'wide-cab' designs with various anticollision and safety provisions, including relatively heavy construction and anticollision posts.

If Volker Landwehr were still posting here, he could comment much better than I about the different European approaches to cab safety, largely including more reliance on CEM (collision energy management), the careful use of energy-absorbing construction and materials to reduce crash danger to crews rather than the use of very heavy construction for the same purpose.

It has been noted that, once the CEM has done its job, or in accidents where the forces involved don't engage the construction as expected, the remaining structure in much European design tends to come apart like wet tissue paper.  It has also been noted that no matter how much armoring goes into an S-580-compliant cab, something awful will cause it to fail to protect (as in a recent accident where standing flatcars went right up over the nose and took out the cab from the windows up, which no collision-post construction practical to use would likely prevent.)

Some of the 'written in blood' accidents leading to the adoption of S-580 bear looking at, including several involving collisions of passenger trains with standing trucks that would have been survivable if, say, the number board boxes hadn't let burning fuel straight into the cab.

See some of the posts in this thread.  (I miss Ed, again!)