The irony in this discussion is that the One-Man F40 Preservation Society has been severely hearing-impaired for most (if not all) of his life and now has a cochlear implant......

You could address the risk of hearing loss caused by turbocharger noise by preserving a rail grinding F40PH (if any are still available) but this would not resolve issues caused by pre-existing conditions.

PC

Or you could just wear some ear plugs or other appropriate hearing protection.

Oops... (deleted) :-)

If you've been following the litigation apparently the the earplugs used by the military in recent years didn't work...

I wasn't an engineer until the 2000s, but my understanding from talking to more senior employees is that T&E crews on at least some Class Is were actually not allowed to wear ear plugs up until at least the 1980s, if not the 1990s, to make sure that they could hear everything going on in the cab. If someone else has more detailed knowledge of policy back then, please enlighten me.

My suggestion is to use musicians earplugs. They let the entire spectrum of sound through, just attenuated. They're not cheap, though. I carry Loop Professional wherever I go. They don't jam way down in your ear canal causing other yucky problems. 18dB reduction and comes with an insert that adds another 5dB reduction if needed. Comes with various sizes of two different materials of seals to fit your ear canal. Kinda look like jewelry for your ears. Cheap foam plugs muffle too much and are just plain nasty.

I never heard of anybody being written up for failure to comply, but BN wanted us to wear ear plugs at least between 1979 and 1991. I didn't because I was afraid I couldn't hear what was happening on the radio, and it turned out that I prevented a fatality because of it. If I had ever sued the company for hearing loss, they would have gotten somebody to testify against me.

Nowadays, I think they have headphones with the radio playing. I guess that protects you from ambient noise, but how can a fella hear what's going on in the cab ??

An EMD option on the safety cab units in the 1990s and 2000s as I recall was a "quiet cab" or "whisper cab". For anyone who operated them, did those actually reduce the noise level? Possibly not when you have your head out the window anyway. I always wondered why those weren't simply standard if they helped at all.

I never liked the wide cabs with "work stations" instead of control stands, but I heard good things about them from guys in the coal pool. If your job involved a lot of switching, you wanted to see a man riding on the steps, so you'd open the window and stick your head out. That's why my right ear is deafer than my left one. It kind of goes with the territory...

I did get to run many of the '90s "quiet cabs" from both EMD and GE, and they did help, at least to the point you didn't have to scream to have a conversation across the cab, and the radio didn't have to be at full volume to be heard at run 8, as long as the windows could be closed. I'm sure the ex-Conrail SD60Is and Ms were pretty good about that when they were new, but I first saw them after the CSX/NS split and they were pretty well worn by then. The first one I rode in as a conductor trainee down the RF&P to Richmond, had me thinking we were going to fly off the tracks and die, it was that bouncy and rough at 50 mph (mind you I came from being an LSA on the NEC at 125 mph). When I got to be the guy in the right-hand seat, more than once I had to hang onto the desk throttle lever for dear life on some crossover switches to hold my seat.

Sorry to continue the thread drift.... In general aviation, you see a lot of noise-cancelling headphones with microphones for radio and in-cabin/cockpit communications. They work really well and I think would work wonders in a noisy cab. Is that something available to railroaders?

Oh, why not. I was on some BSNF run-through units, mostly Dash 9s, that had jacks next to the overhead reading lights for plugging in a headset. I have no idea if their crews used them. They were nice units. They had electric refrigerators instead of just ice boxes, windshield washers, not just wipers, and high-back reclining seats.

The BN tried this for a little while. I use a former BN SD40-2 that still has headphone jacks and volume control knobs all over the cab.

The kind of 'noise-canceling headphone' you'd use on a locomotive would be like an over-the-ear "hearing protector" -- like the old-school type of headphones -- with stereo microphone picking up outside sounds and a stereo amplification setup relaying that to speakers at the ear. The 'noise canceling' involves generating antiphase sound for the 'noise' signals and frequencies, but passing those in speech or other 'desired' sound. It has been relatively easy for some time to measure chronic or anticipated environmental noise and effectively blank it, while retaining spoken language quite audible; you have to be careful not to randomly 'blank' all noise above a certain amplitude, lest you mask shouting or other indications of trouble.

I thought the 'jack' was only to connect a voice microphone in the headset -- not the noise-cancelling microphone array -- to the train radio, so a simple foot switch or ALC would allow talking without manipulating the radio or bending to talk into a fixed mike.