News Wire: Progress Rail announces new switch locomotive

[Brian Schmidt]

New EMD24B is Tier 4 compliant and uses parts of a GP40

http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2017/02/23-emd-switcher

[Leo_Ames]

Any engine commonality with EMD's new 1010? If it's just the latest revision of the Cat engine that carried that designation number in the past, it didn't make it in the railroad business 30 years ago, and I doubt it does now.

It especially sounds similar with all the EMD technology that has been reused. Good for controlling cost, but perhaps less than ideal for taking full advantage of a more modern power plant that long ago proved itself in other uses like the maritime world. 

And this strikes me as the same corporation competing with itself, although I doubt it affects EMD's ECO repower line any. If it were a road switcher option utilizing the same technology in scaled down form as EMD's latest T4 road locomotive, maybe that would sway a Class 1 somewhere.

Instead, I bet they'll be hard pressed to ever sell more than 20 of these and they'll all go to urban centers and be paid for by taxpayer funds. To get major orders out of the pockets of a Class 1, this has to be significantly superior to something like a GP20ECO to get a major railroad to take on the task of maintaining a new line of engines and all the associated costs. 

And matching, let alone topping EMD, is something all these alternative green suppliers of locomotives have yet to manage. So far it has just been one dud after another, with them hangar queens and enjoying extremely short lifespans while 45 year old GP38-2's keep polishing Class 1 rails with often little more than in-kind overhauls. 

[RME]

Looks like Pacific Harbor is following up on the stellar success of the PR43Cs ... oh, wait... and that was with the more modern engine family, too...

Seems to me there are locomotives in other parts of the world that use the Cat 3512 engine, so perhaps this exercise isn't the proof of the definition of insanity that it might appear to be.

[YoHo1975]

PHC had the PR30Cs and I thought they were happy enough with them. Maybe I've asked this before, but if you're adding SCR anyway, could you not do so with an EMD 2 stroke itself? I mean, in a market like PHL where SCR can be tolerated, why not work with the long beloved engine? Could you retrofit the ECO? Or better yet, could you retrofit the 645? I mean, I get CAT thinking on this. They have an engine model that exists, that has an SCR kit for it, why not put it in the application. Solves a Caterpillar problem, not a customer problem. And I have no idea what the EMD two-stroke would do with SCR. Maybe still wouldn't meet Tier 4, but I have to imagine that the sales of such a beast would be pretty solid.

[NorthWest]

Finally figured out why this has been bothering me... The unit was released under the PR24B designation more than a month ago:

http://s7d2.scene7.com/is/content/Caterpillar/CM20170106-45858-11357

Very interesting in the whole scheme of things that this has been renamed the EMD24B after the demise of the independent EMD brand and the consideration that pretty much everything Progress Rail has built hasn't exactly worked...