There are physical measures as well don’t forget; aside from actually having the knowledge to power up the cab and operate controls sufficiently to get a train moving, there is also the infrastructure - if a train is stabled there’s a good chance that you won’t get very far before you reach a set of points that are facing the wrong way, for example. That could easily have your grand adventure ending up in a slow speed derailment. There is likely to be TPWS involved, you would need to know how to overcome that. And so on. If the aim was simply to cause disruption then you might well achieve that, to some degree, regardless. But if it was a major incident or just a long joyride that you were after, the chances of failure are substantial.So what kind of security is afforded to a train stabled at a station? Are they locked? Are they under constant video surveillance? Or is there effectively nothing preventing anyone keen to access a driving cab from doing so?
Freight locos seem to be a different level, I mentioned upthread the regularity with which they (particularly Class 66s!) can be seen wafting around with all the cab doors wide open, both the active cab and at the other end. There appears to be largely zero effort to maintain the security of the cabs, which is a tad alarming given that many of these trains are in and out of secure areas which form part of the national infrastructure, and you might think they’d constitute obvious targets for nefarious behaviour.Coming from the passenger world (where yes, we have powered cab doors where once you press the "close" button it locks when it closes) it seems weird that security is so lax with locos. Surely the external doors have key locks (08s and 67s certainly do) which should be secured if the loco is to be left unsupervised. That applies to the inactive cab too.
Last edited: