Interesting conversation gentleman! A couple things to note. There was no
question about replacing steam with diesel in the US and Canada for a lot of
reasons. Once it started it was going to happen and steam really had no chance
of staying. The most important issues in the economics off the decision were
not technological but economic and very important in the time and place the
decision to dieselize in North America took place. In a different place or a
different time the decisions may have been different or at least how the
changeover was implemented may have changed and the changeover in North America
occurred at different times in different places. The change did start though
in the 1930s, not 1950s and that played a role as well. It was going to happen
here though regardless of what technologies were on the Steam horizon.
Some specific issues that have and have not been discussed (many of these are
inter-related and the list would be too long to show all the interactions that
increased these arguments further):
- impact of the war (WWII) on diesel technology
- Fuel costs and the structure of the coal industry at the time (particularly
unionized labour and strikes)
- impact of diesel on facility needs (maintenance and service facilities)
- impact of the diesel on labour requirements - direct (crews) and indirect
(service and maintenance)
- implementation of the diesel to combat the Depression and autos (particularly
passenger service)
- implementation of standardized locomotives that could be used anywhere
- parts standardization greatly reducing service costs (traction motors for
example can be used on many different locomotive types compared to specialized
parts for each steam engine and steam engine type)
- reduced labour specialization required, lowering wage bills and increasing
labour flexibility in service and maintenance
- much higher service ratios (steam was "in the shop" much more often than
diesels in general)
- impact on financing costs (standardized diesels could be sold to any railroad
and therefore could be used as collateral in reinvestment financing and had a
higher capital asset value)
- flexibility of the fleet increased by using diesels and their ability to MU
or not as service required, creating the need for only a very few types of
locomotive versus the specialized steam that had to be built and maintained
which increased locomotive cost
- fuel efficiency
- better braking and lowered impact on rails
- pollution issues in urban centres
The case against electrification was the extreme capital cost of
electrification across a railway and the impact on operation, which has already
been covered well here.
This is just a few of the economies diesels offered across the board. It is
true that today you can find and define a few places where some of these issues
were not true or didn't matter (for example labour costs were incredibly low in
developing countries contributing to the continued use of steam, or the
existence of some technologies that could have reduced the efficiency gap had
they been implemented) but overall and in sum all of the advantages of diesels
meant as soon as diesel technology was ready it was adopted as soon as a
railroad could afford it. The idea that steam could have stayed on in North
America is a fallacy given the economics of the whole transition period. The
differences among railroads in the process of adoption were caused by how
pressing these issues were and their ability to reinvest or afford the costs
associated with the changeover, combined with some institutional rigidities
such as existing labour agreements for example.
If anyone is interested I can send them a very large PowerPoint presentation I
use in one of my senior economics classes looking at the case of diesel
transition on the Union Pacific (I teach in Wyoming after all!). While the
conditions in Canada (and other parts of the US) were different in degree, the
overall economics were similar across the two countries. I use it as a case
study in technology adoption and the material is copyrighted and will
eventually end up in a text and article.
Great discussion! Thanks for all the thoughts!
-rob
Robert Godby
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Economics and Finance
University of Wyoming
Laramie, WY 82070
307-766-3843
