Re: Questions about headlights?

I've often wondered why, for safety reasons, the NG RR tourist business has not adopted more modern bulb technology to retrofit engine headlamps. Historical river counters wouldn't know the difference.

Certainly with modern bulb technology there are lamps which will throw twice the illumination down the ROW, to detect falling rocks or a Hereford 2000 lb. bulls straying on the tracks. Perhaps it will take some major incident to wake some people up.

Even before modern 'ditch-lights' the primary headlights on modern diesels far out perform historical era headlights on NG engines.

Some have jokingly suggest A/C landing lights. This wouldn't work because although A/c landing lights are incredibly bright, they need the air stream cooling to keep them from burning to a crisp.

One wonders why some NG RR operator has not been enlightened (pun intended) to contact someone like GE or Sylvania, to work on this problem. Electrical systems on locos and aircraft are NOT that different, but the safety factor for mountain NG engines, could mean the difference between stopping and disaster.