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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by APG45 [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by MichaelSol [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by The Duke Maybe you said it I can't find it, but why were the interest charges higher on the diesels than new steam. Understandably they could have bought them slower, but in the end the cost would be the same, would it not? [/quote] The idea that it's "all the same" is not accurate. There are two fundamentally different methods of financing involved here................................... [/quote] That's great but how about answering his question??? I've noticed you conveniently ignore relevent questions or go off on tangents hoping to confuse readers. Fortunately most of us are too educated and intelligent to fall for it. [/quote] Sounds like you're just plain confused. I'll "diseducate" it down for you with an analogy you can understand. You have a 5 year old car. It's probably good for another 5 years, but you want a brand new hybrid, it's all the rage now, gotta keep up with the neighbors. Normally, a person would simply trade in the old one to get cash off on the new one, and then you are making payments for the rest out of your future income (debt servicing). Just what you've always done previously. Except..... Imagine if your 5 year old car has no trade-in market with which to wedge down the price of a new car (which is analogous to the railroads' lack of a trade-in market for steam). You have a choice of either (1) running your old car another 5 years until you can accumulate enough ca***o buy (or at least make a substantial downpayment on) the new hybrid, or (2) you can go ahead and just scrap the 5 year old car and go into deeper debt to get that new hybrid. What do you think will happen to your future cash flow if you do #2 as opposed to #1? Frankly, it wouldn't matter if the new car you covet was just another spark-ignition auto (analogy = steam locomotive) or a new "technologically advanced" gas-electric hybrid (analogy = diesel locomotive), if you scrap an auto with another 5 years of useful service life to get that new car (along with a much higher debt obligation), you're going to have cash flow problems in the future. If instead of scrapping not-so-old steam locomotive and going all out for wholesale dieselization, the railroads had instead done the same thing for all new steamers, the future drop in ROI would probably followed the same drop over the years. What compounded this unnecessary debt load increase was the first generation diesel's relatively short service life, forcing even greater debt accumulation for those second and third generation diesels.
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