trainmaster611 wrote:
kaitoku wrote:EMD/Caterpillar will have a product for a market with decent and realistic potential, based on technology where U.S. builders actually have proven strength and world-class knowhow (diesel locomotives), unlike EMU designs.
That alone I don't think is a good reason to choose a diesel locomotive over an EMU. There's a lot of arguments for choosing a diesel loco but this one holds the least water.
I didn't interpret that statement that way. The U.S. is behind--way behind--in passenger rail technology (ever since the disastrous Budd "experiments" of the 1970s, the Metroliners and SPV2000s), and I felt like what we were talking about in part is the (perceived?) need for U.S. builders to gear up for expanded passenger equipment production (and possibly a desire to create export equipment). This is in line with the rumor mill that GE wants to acquire AnsaldoBreda (it's all over Skyscraper City's railways forums)--and with the likely trajectories of passenger rail both in the U.S. and globally over the next decade or so. (
Yes, I am really hedging myself here.)
The major problem is then--since the U.S. is so far behind*--how to get back up to speed? Developing from scratch has the rather difficult problem that engineers elsewhere who were working at the level you are today are all retired or dead or gone; starting with someone else's tech tends to involve convoluted intellectual-property arrangements unless you're Chinese; buying a fading equipment maker is not for the faint of heart of the small of assets. GE can put enormously more muscle into this enterprise than EMD. And what about electrification? Buffett has previously suggested that $4/gal gas is the breakeven point for mainline freight electrification--and since he owns BNSF, this is no small claim. EMD has worked exclusively with diesel units for its entire history; GE has not, in fact, produced any electrics for well-nigh 40 years. As long as the idiocy that is the FRA is in place it will be difficult-to-impossible to import units: this means that the market suppliers
have to reorient themselves to stay in sync with demand. And that is exactly what we are seeing.
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*
Pace an earlier post in this thread: staying in neutral when your competition is racing ahead full forward
is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as falling behind. This is what's known as "relativity".
"A train or a train concept with a history of success elsewhere should by default be legal on mainline tracks in the US and so should the established operating and maintenance practice..." --
Alon Levy
