Doug Cummings wrote:
Believe it or not but the railroad had standardized steam locomotives and
interchangeable parts long before the diesels came. In fact if you study the
early years of dieselization this was one of the major complaints, lack of
standardization and interchangeable parts. There was some commonality
between products of the same builders but that was as far as it went. Some
of them used different traction motors under different models, so their
interchangeability was not what everyone thinks it was.
But during the era of the USRA, the biggest complaint the railroads had
was about standardization. They argued that their needs were unique and
that a standard design would not suffice.
Most of the railroads in North America did not have a regular amortization
and replacement policy for their cars and locomotives and while they bought
quite a few cars and locomotives in the early 1920's this died off and very
little was bought after the mid-1920's. The infrastructure was equally as old
and as obsolete. Yes, they were ripe for change and saw the opportunity with
diesels as did the salesmen who were promoting it.
The steam locomotive builders didn't seem to get it. Baldwin would
build you anything you wanted. Lima and ALCO were a little more
progressive, but they still tended to build engines unique to the
railroad. They also marketed their products to the person in charge of
motive power.
GM, on the other hand, aimed their marketing at the money men. They
went armed with all kinds of charts, graphs, and pages of numbers. They
spoke the language of accounting, and making decisions based on numbers.
They convinced those who cut the cheques that diesels were cheaper.
The cost differences were not much, but they were in favour of diesels.
Twenty cents a mile may not sound like much, but over tens of thousands
of miles, it starts to become a very big number of dollars.
The New York Central did a big study and even published it, showing that
in the long run, diesels were cheaper.
But there were exceptions. Take note of the Norfolk & Western. They kept
their fleet and facilities modern, and they had one stop servicing for their
steam locomotives, everything could be done without moving the locomotive.
They could come in off a trip and be fully fueled and serviced and be turned
around to go back to work in less than an hour because they had established
one stop servicing facilities. They had extremely high equipment utilization
and had very modern locomotives.
Another issue that became a problem was that at this point in time,
steam technology was pretty well at it's zenith. Getting more power was
not easy, and any new technologies that appeared showed up too late to
stop the relentless advance of the diesel. They never got enough
testing to demonstrate they were practical, and often were rushed into
service, creating new problems in terms of maintenance and service.
