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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Murphy Siding Perhaps I missed this detail. Did the railroads finance the purchase of steam locomotives, or pay cash for them? [/quote] My [2c]: Remember, steam locomotive purchases were done on a staggered as needed basis, not purchased as a wholesale changeover of the entire locomotive fleet. As railroads grew out of the 1800's and into the 1900's, they added more newer steam as necessary, and ran their old steam into the ground before it was scrapped or rebuilt. The main point of the Brown study was that the advent of dieselization resulted in a wholesale locomotive fleet changeover in a relatively short amount of time, thus for the first time in the industry's history they accumulated a debtload before which had been unseen. This action also resulted in a large percentage of each railroad's steam locomotive fleet being scrapped when those locomotives still had 20 or 30 years of useful service life. Thus the cost of lost depreciation. Look at the WP link provided by selector. Western Pacific bought brand new 2-8-8-2's and 4-6-6-4's in 1937. Within 15 years those still new locomotives had been scrapped in favor of the new diesels, so those steamers probably had at least another 15 years of useful service life, and probably would have been good for another 30 years. Then look at the life span of WP's first FT diesels. They barely lasted 10 years before they were in need of replacement! Even without the benefit of the Brown study, the problems of premature massive dieselization should be obvious to anyone.
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