DutchRailnut wrote:not seen or heard any complaints from Engineers in Europe, so a lot of complaints may be Amtrak maintenance related.
Big problem with the american cabs is the seats. The seats i dont know where they came from. Maybe a stationary crane somewhere that doesnt move. They have harsh metal edges that you get your pants caught on and rip them, and they like to tear the ends of the control desks, the walls and corners of the doors up. I dont think germany uses this same seat. The seat used in the ALP46 does not have this problem its soft everywhere and doesnt damage anything.
If amtrak did something as simple as clean the cabs, that could help. We americans in general are rough on things and if we had a place to put the reverser, they wouldn't have started cutting up the stickers that they put all over the desktops. The black portion you see with all the labels on it in any cab photo is a big fat sticker. Its junk. European stuff has this too, but they are more gentle on things i guess. And i think they have a place to dump the reverser like NJT does. yes there is a place in the fusee box to put it, but thats too far from the desk and nobody does it so it pretty much never ends up in there.
If they did something as simple as used glue to hold the door gaskets on, we wouldnt have a problem with door gaskets getting torn up. Likely in germany they use glue. In america we probably omitted that to save money. NJTs door gaskets are close to 20 years old and none of them are torn up like amtraks.
No good deed goes unpunished.