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Ok - I hear ya. I've been an EMD fan my whole life - even hated GE's when I was younger. However, whether this is taboo or not, I like both now. BNSF's exec's can't be that stupid (or else almost all other large railroad exec's are stupid too), as other roads like CN, CP, NS, KCS have overwhelmingly favored GE's in recent years. Even UP, which has bought SD-70M's like crazy, has still been purchasing a large number of GE's every year. As much as I like the EMD's, the GE's can't possibly be that bad of a product. I used to visit Santa Fe's Corwith yard in Chicago quite a bit, and I also used to talk to a lot of Union Pacific and Conrail crews running westbound freights through River Forest into Proviso Yard - one thing I noticed was that even the engineers who personally liked EMD's better usually admitted (at least back in the pre-AC days) that GE's didn't load up as fast as the EMD's, but once those GE's got moving, they hauled the tonnage at higher sustained speeds over the road (usually comparing the 4000 hp Dash 8's with the 3800 hp 60 series - makes sense). Look at UP and CP, which have large fleets of EMD and GE AC units. Although outright performance is not the only factor that goes into a purchase decision (price, perhaps politics as well), you can't possibly take the position that if GE's were so markedly inferior to EMD's that two large (and relatively successful) railroads, which could compare the two products in extensive, side by side testing, would consciously dump millions of dollars into complete garbage. Even the dumbest directors would have been fired by their respective boards of directors if that were the case. Last point - I've been looking at tonnage charts in the CP employee timetable for the AC4400 and the SD90MAC (presumably those rated at only 4300 hp). On all subdivisions in the timetable, the AC4400 has a higher tonnage rating. Not only that, but CP continues to buy the GE's year after year, but no EMD's in several years. I'm certainly not trying to convert any EMD fans into GE fans (I still lean a little more towards EMD myself). In my humble opinion, GE's don't get the credit they deserve, despite whatever weaknesses they might have.
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