Found this on YouTube, and thought some here might find it interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36CCu--Eqzc

This kind of photographic walk-through tour plays very well with the general public. People who have never been inside a diesel locomotive are usually very impressed with the size and complexity of the machines. It also goes over well with the younger railroad enthusiasts whose interests are highly technical. It is nice if a photo tour of a "covered wagon" or BL can be tied together with some artwork of the locomotive to identify exactly where you are in the carbody and what you are looking at.

PC

I really liked that...it's a great idea, actually. Clip is perfect length for most people. Two things come to mind: wouldn't it have been neat if when the cameraman arrived in the cab, there was a real (living) engineer sitting there, ready to answer his questions...(I know just the right guy too!)

My other comment is, only 59 were ever built?? That's amazing.

There is definitely a place for technical presentations in the preservation world, and the highly positive response to the youtube BL2 posting pretty much proves it. The interest in the general public is much more in the awesome size of railroad equipment and in learning how it works than in the quality of the paint application or the absolute historical correctness of every minute detail. And it is the general public that usually brings in most of the money.

I think folks doing equipment preservation sometimes get overly hung up on a need for everything to be complete and perfect or it cannot be displayed. Actually equipment that is disassembled is often even more interesting to look at, and the public has far fewer chances to see it in that condition.

And while many people like to throw around the popular term "interpretive presentation" as if it is something of a guarantee of excellence, most diesel roadswitchers (as well as some diesel switchers) are some of the best training aids ever built for doing an interpretive presentation, superb speaking stages equipped with handrails, yet surprisingly few organizations ever make use of them in that way.

I still occasionally get positive comments from people who attended the ERS (now ELHS) convention at the Erie-Lackawanna Diesel Shop in Marion, Ohio in the early 1970s, when we brought out one of the SD's and opened up all the carbody doors and did a component by component teaching tour of all the machinery and then took questions. People still remember it and mention it 35 years later.

And that was done right in the middle of the ready tracks of a very busy railroad shop. What a wonderful and cooperative group of friends we had in the management of the Erie-Lackawanna!

PC

Interesting tour. Monon #32 at the Kentucky Railway museum has a large concrete casting in the nose of the locomotive. I just assumed this was standard equipment in non Steam Generator equipped BL2s