Has anyone ever been to the Caterpillar Visitor Center? If not, and you’re in the Peoria area it’s kind of a fun hour or two.
You get a cheesy video (in the bed of a 797F) from Oberhelman but once that’s done you can roam around and get in a few machines and flip switches and mess around. There’s an area with simulators that was pretty cool. They had 3 excavators and 3 track type tractors. In the simulator you can dig and fill in holes and stuff and the ground actually changes. Then there’s a museum walk through thing that shows some of the technology Cat uses to design machines and then some historical info about the old machines and the company when it started.
I enjoyed it but I’m an employee so I got to tell my girlfriend like “I work on that. I wrote that thing. We use this every day.” It’d probably be fun if you had kids that were into construction equipment. It was NOT a good place for my 4 year old roommates. They got bored very quick and wanted to run around in the museum part. The only thing they liked was getting in the machines trying to hunt around for the keys so they could start them and crash them.
I took a quick video just showing the machine area trying to get some scale on the 797F.
For more information:
http://www.caterpillar.com/en/company/visitors-center.html
Fir Works 