UP 8125 ES44 leading the Amtrak Texas Eagle at Uptown Station!

Wow. I'll bet there is a story there. Clearly the ES44 is a rescue job as the P42 cab would be unusable. How did that windshield get destroyed, we wonder? You can see the window frame is actually bent and there are several dents in the sheet metal. The right-side wiper blade is all bent up. Something fell from overhead? Ice from an overpass? A vandal attempting murder by dropping something off the side of a bridge?

Bird strike?

It would have to be an awful big bird. I don't see how a bird could bend the window frame. Also notice the several dents above the windshield.

Several dents on everything above windshield , looks like on the upper front right corner missing some paint

geysergazer posted:

It would have to be an awful big bird. I don't see how a bird could bend the window frame. Also notice the several dents above the windshield.

Pretty sure it was a goose that put a plane in the Hudson.

From Wiki:

US Airways Flight 1549 is a classic example of this. The engines on the Airbus A320 used on that flight were torn apart by multiple bird strikes at low altitude. There was no time to make a safe landing at an airport, forcing a water landing in the Hudson River.

Jet engine intakes are very delicate things (wrt bird strikes) compared with a locomotive windshield and especially the surrounding metalwork:

Jet engine ingestion is extremely serious due to the rotation speed of the engine fan and engine design. As the bird strikes a fan blade, that blade can be displaced into another blade and so forth, causing a cascading failure. Jet engines are particularly vulnerable during the takeoff phase when the engine is turning at a very high speed and the plane is at a low altitude where birds are more commonly found.

 It is the bent frame and several dents that make me think of heavy debris such as rocks/concrete/ice rather than bird strike.

Great pictures, I googled several searches and no information showed. I hope no one in the P42 was hurt.

I took a vulture down the starboard intake of an F-4J at 450 kts on a low level over the Smokies.  Results were almost instantaneous and made for an interesting "event"...single engine return to Oceana after getting the aircraft under control and shutting down the engine.  Thankfully the engine contained the blades - loved the J-79.

If the skin of that engine is aluminum, a bird strike could certainly do that kind of damage.  Impact speed could have been in excess of 100mph, which translates to LOT of energy in a large bird.

Because of crew safety I'd be surprised if the nose is aluminum. That nose was designed to withstand a lot of impact energy, as in a loaded stone-truck crossways on a grade crossing. That is why those windshields are actually pretty small. In this pic it is easy to see the bolted-on quickly replaceable lower nose-piece (in case of the inevitable grade-crossing crash.

geysergazer posted:

Because of crew safety I'd be surprised if the nose is aluminum.

The "skin" of the nose just may be aluminum, as all the structural strength is under that "skin". In fact, the units on the California Commuter trains out of LA have fiberglass nose pieces, for easy replacement when basing into vehicles.

That nose was designed to withstand a lot of impact energy, as in a loaded stone-truck crossways on a grade crossing.

As I just stated, above, the strength is all hidden under that nose "skin".

That is why those windshields are actually pretty small. In this pic it is easy to see the bolted-on quickly replaceable lower nose-piece (in case of the inevitable grade-crossing crash.

Looks like steel to me:

This image is housed at Wikipedia and I have permission to Post it here under Creative Commons Rules. The photographer was S. Shankar of Dubai.

ON EDIT: Embiggened for better visualization of the dings:

Really looks like steel to me. While those dings are on the lower nose-piece it would be bad engineering to switch to sheet aluminum for the upper nose because of galvanic corrosion.