Oyster Bay Railroad Museum visitors can get hands-on experience driving an LIRR simulated cab
Heng Ye, left, and Jeff Bush, the bookkeeper for the Oyster Bay Railroad museum, teamed up to get a replica of the M7 train. Credit: Howard Simmons
Visitors to the Oyster Bay Railroad Museum can soon sit in a cab and operate a train from Hempstead to Penn Station without an engineer's license or traveling down the 21 miles of Long Island Rail Road track.
The driving force behind this experience is Heng Ye, 17, an 11th-grader at Smithtown High School West with computer programing know-how, who took on the challenge to help transform an LIRR simulator cab for public use after reaching out to museum officials. The cab sat idle at the museum rail yard for more than half a decade until Ye pitched a plan to convert it so rail buffs can operate the cab as an engineer would, replete with sights and sounds of an actual train ride.
The cab, a replica of an M7 car, once was used to instruct LIRR engineers to operate their trains, said Jeff Bush, 76, the museum's bookkeeper. It came with components including the train's control but lacked screen displays that would have surrounded the cab in the former training facility where it was housed, Bush said. To make it useful for visitors, Ye needed to gut the simulator, reconfigure its elaborate wiring, install computer equipment and write new code.
“I felt that implementing this as a real simulator where the visitors could actually try to control the train and see the track ahead of them using the original controls would be effective for visitors to become more interested in this field,” Ye, of Smithtown, said in an interview.
The LIRR donated the simulator to the museum in 2018, said John Specce, president of the Oyster Bay Railroad Museum.
Ye, who visited the museum as a child, reached out to the nonprofit after he learned it had acquired the simulator.
In January, he sent an email asking if he could take on the project. An avid computer programmer who has taken programming classes since fourth grade, he said he "found that hardware projects like this one have an appeal to me because I have so much fun seeing my work actually up and running on a physical product."
Bush said the members of the board were interested in Ye's proposal, “but nobody had a clue what he was talking about.”
The board chose Bush to work with Ye. The project required them to gut the train and figure out its wiring, among other hurdles.
By month's end, those visiting the museum will be able to sit at the cab's controls and get a simulated experience of driving a train. They'll hear the sounds of an LIRR commute — from the train moving down the tracks to the station announcements and the doors opening and closing.
The simulator came with the control system of an M7 — a main throttle lever surrounded by other controls and display screens an engineer would use to operate and monitor the train. Without the other sensory elements that would have normally accompanied the simulator at an MTA facility, it was only a husk of its former self.
Ye also wrote the computer code to bring the train to life.
“The main control lever — it’s a huge lever and very complicated,” Bush said. “He had to figure out how to get what that was actually controlling and interpret it electrically so the software program would know what it was seeing.”
Between January and mid-April, the museum’s simulator went from a metal box with authentic controls to a functional simulator that displays the real train line between Hempstead and Penn Station — fully equipped with the vibrations and sounds of a real LIRR train.
Users will see real-time displays, including speed and other diagnostic data like the status of the train doors, as they operate the train on the one-hour ride. The controls will automatically reset for the next visitor, Ye said.
“It's just very fun to play around in the simulator and actually sit in the genuine driver's cab and using genuine controls to control the simulator,” Ye said. “The sound system we've installed in there [makes] it so immersive, we can actually feel the vibrations in the ground.”
Bush said the project cost the museum about $2,000.
The museum and its rail yard opened to the public on April 27. Bush said the museum expects to open the simulator to visitors by the end of May.
"It's quite an amazing experience," he said.
- The Oyster Bay Railroad Museum later this month will unveil a fully functioning M7 train simulator.
- Visitors will be able to operate the train on the LIRR line from Hempstead to Penn Station.
- A 17-year-old Smithtown High School West student spearheaded the project.
Joseph Ostapiuk covers the Town of Oyster Bay and the City of Glen Cove. He joined Newsday in 2023 after spending more than six years at the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com.
