Controls
Some "B" units cannot be moved without a controlling unit attached, but most have some simple controls inside, and often a side window at that control station. For example, B unit versions of the EMD FT with conventional couplers had a fifth porthole-style window added on the right side only for the control station. Other models used existing windows. These controls enable a hostler to move the B-unit locomotive by itself in a yard or shops. (A hostler is an employee permitted to move locomotives within the confines of a yard or shops complex, but not on the main railroad.) B units without controls are generally semi-permanently coupled to controlling units. Sometimes, there is a terminology distinction between the types: a booster is a B unit with hostler controls, and a slave is a B unit without hostler controls.
Read more about this topic: B Unit
Famous quotes containing the word controls:
“Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“Comparatively, we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagination. The imagination knows—nothing escapes its glance from out its eyry—and it controls the breast.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We’ve got to figure these things a little bit different than most people. Y’know, there’s something about going out in a plane that beats any other way.... A guy that washes out at the controls of his own ship, well, he goes down doing the thing that he loved the best. It seems to me that that’s a very special way to die.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)