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Other thoughts: Labor costs for locomotive crews do not enter into the steam vs diesel cost debate until consist tonnage began to exceed the abilities of the largest modern steam locomotives. Up until that point, you had to have an engineer and a fireman, steam or diesel. Once train tonnage exceeded steam's ability to handle that tonnage with a single locomotive, the diesel's MU ability skewed that cost factor in diesel's favor. That being said, if someone had invented a way to MU steam locomotives, allowing a single engine crew to handle more than one steam locomotive, hmmmm.................(?) There is an industrial analogy to the across the board dieselization of railroads in the 1950's and the associated financing "legacy" costs of mass dieseliztion. In the electric utility sector today, there is a push being made for mass AMR (Automated Meter Reading) installation, whereby utilities are replacing perfectly good analog meters with the AMR's, because as we all "know" the labor savings from eliminating meter readers will result in some great future savings for the company(s) down the road. Of course, there is a cost to this mass meter replacement, so the utilities have made sure each state's PUC authorizes a rate increase to pay for this project. Thus, these companies were allowed to use rate increases to pay for such a massive capital overhaul, whereas the railroads probably were not allowed to increase rates to pay for dieselization. Problem is, not every state has authorized such a rate increase, so some utilities are having a cash flow crisis because they jumped head first into full scale meter replacement thinking the rate increase was a slam dunk, and when such a rate increase was turned down after the fact........well, you all get the picture. The point is, a lot of ostensibly well managed well meaning American corporations will take actions akin to plunging head first into murky waters/burning bridges to the immediate past, etc., because they want to appear as "cutting edge" to their stockholders. It will be interesting to see if those utilities that AMR'ed before a rate increase to pay for it was authorized will be able to maintain ROI, or if those ROI's in future years will mirror the ROI trend of the railroads post dieselization.
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