MEC407 wrote:If the all-GE thing is to happen, it's difficult for me to imagine it happening by 2019 (the date given by Mr. Burkholder). This is a company that historically hasn't had the will or the capability to do things of that magnitude that quickly (or at all). To do so would be very aggressive and very ambitious, especially by PAR standards. Where there's a will, there's a way... but do they have the will?
Consider the magnitude of what's being suggested. Out of 107 locomotives currently on the roster (I'm excluding 1, 2, and 007), they'd be dumping and replacing all but 20 of them. Can that be done by 2019? Yes, of course. Can PAR do that by 2019? Well...
Not sure why they'd bother going that whole-hog with roster turnover anyway if a company sale or partition by '19 is still decent odds. NS is not going to take one single steel-wheeled object of theirs when it takes over PAS, so Waterville is going to be stuffed to the gills with excess power AND railcars that no longer have a role on the shrunken system. IIRC some pages back in one of the rolling stock threads (long before the GE imports) one of our ex-employee regulars broke down what the PAS-less roster needs would be to run all D1+2 jobs in-house w/ generous padding for managing old bones...and it was about
60 locos.
Figure that's a little bit less now that they've got a higher total share of six-axles and something fresher to build around with the 8-40C's. Those would be immediately reassigned post-partition to Worcester-Ayer-Portland and Portland-Waterville mainline duty on the heftiest runs, allowing for somewhat smaller lashups and more cutbacks to the four-axle roster now relegated more to local duty. Then figure less still if the next buyer overturned the rest of the roster's most tired and rusted masses with fresher bodies and took half as good a care of them as, say, the four New England G&W roads do with their collective power. And that the forceful purging of Guilfordian slop-ops by a competent operator slashes back the power wasted all over the road each and every day by blown schedules, excessive canning, haphazard dispatching in & out of the yards, and deplorable mainline physical plant. Now you're talking far less of a padding glut for Waterville's rolling ruins behaving like rolling ruins on ruined rails...and probably can comfortably operate the partitioned system on sub-50 units of well-distributed six- and four-axles.
I could see the logic in piling up another dozen-plus decent condition Dash 8's on-the-cheap if that gives a prospective next buyer of the system 50-60% of a bedrock Class II roster that's not so deferred on maint they can't apply their own shop standards to that inherited power. The EMD's are far too worn out to keep, and rebuilds of fresher power are too cheap these days to try to roll back the attrition with any full-on rebuilds of them; every last Geep's going to get auctioned off for the sake of starting over. So there can be a *little* positive benefit to the company's valuation if they've sporting a baseline of 2-3 dozen GE's serviceable for the long haul with a reasonable distribution of six- vs. four-axle units. But I can't see more than that quantity being anything but a negative-value waste in the long-term, because the PAS-less system post-partition will simply never ever need >5 dozen units and the property value of the 4th and 5th dozen units is wholly dependent on who the eventual buyer is going to be (e.g. maint and ops philosophy re: spares, whether the post-Billerica system will be contiguous with somebody else who already brings a small starting roster in-tow, and so on).
