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It's really not that easy to specifiy a commuter locomotive. Before a railroad is criticized, it's necessary to completely understand the situation. The choice of an inverter or a separate diesel-generator set in a HEP-equipped commuter or passenger unit is influenced by the overall weight of the locomotive, the desired fuel capacity, the desired maintenance costs and intervals, and reliability considerations. Weight per axle is critical. A separate HEP generator set increases weight. FRA crash standards have added a considerable amount of steel to a locomotive, and most four-axle commuter locomotives are right at the upper end of allowable weight if they're to carry any amount of fuel. Using an inverter saves a considerable amount of weight, allowing a higher fuel capacity for a given axle loading, thus reducing fueling intervals. The alternative may be to permit and construct an additional fueling facility, which is neither easy nor inexpensive. Diesel-driven HEP sets add maintenance and in most cases decrease reliability because of the addition of numerous moving parts and items that can fail, in comparison to an inverter. The trend is away from separate HEP sets toward inverters--just as in the 1980s, railroads departed from individual electric generating and air-conditioning units on each passenger car and toward a single locomotive-carried HEP system, in order to achieve lower maintenance costs and higher reliability. The more separate systems are employed, the greater the probability of one or more being in failure at any given time. It takes detailed economic and engineering studies, which incorporate political considerations and funding projections, to determine the optimal solution, and there are rarely perfect solutions. Small shifts in assumptions made on the front end can have large influences on the outcome. It's easy to Monday-morning quarterback, but it takes complete access to all of the data, assumptions, and expertise that's available to the railroad to know if the decision was poorly made or not.
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