Could have free-enterprise freight railroads survived without dieselization?

[Wizlish]

Now we might take up the second half of the question -- even if the railroads had started first-generation dieselization in the '40s and early '50s, could GM's "variant" of NCL have gained traction, perhaps predominantly in the Northeast, in converting failing or financially-troubled railroads over to road-based common carriers using GMC trucks?

I can think of one railroad whose stockholders would likely have jumped at the chance, especially if GMAC were to make them good terms ... the Old and Weary.

[tree68]

The mere existance of internal combustion engines of any sort would likely have led to a conversion - the timing of which would have been predicated by the arrival of a successful design.  

Probably more important was the tying together of the internal combustion engine with the electrical apparatus necessary to move locomotives.  

Had that link not been made, the probability of pure electric railroads would certainly have increased greatly.

[Wizlish]

schlimm

Here's just some pure speculation with little foundation. Might electrification have expanded or at least not contracted?

No hesitation in finding one potential example: PRR would likely have proceeded with the electrification to Pittsburgh.  I believe it's been mentioned that MILW had the financial capability for wiring the part between the two electrified sections, and in the absence of EMD this might have been the 'best' solution for them.  Some other possibilities do come to mind, like ATSF over Raton.

[schlimm]

Here's just some pure speculation with little foundation.   Might electrification have expanded or at least not contracted?

[Wizlish]

I think you're mistaking his point a bit.  He's not just predicating a world in which Sloan didn't put EMD together as a locomotive manufacturer, he's saying 'what if' there had been an effort like NCL that took over freight railroads in distress during the Depression and replaced the steam rail service with diesel trucks (perhaps preferentially and illegally made or engined by GM).

I agree with the point made elsewhere that the 'other' builders were working actively toward diesel power in that period, and that even with considerable capital GM was unlikely to acquire capital interest in enough railroads to make the 'shutdown' of very many roads likely.  (Interurbans and trolleys were a very different situation!). 

I don't think it is very likely that GM would get very far with that idea, especially with roads in the state they were generally at that time.  I would expect Missouri, for example, to impose much the same restrictions they did on larger buses (the Pickwick Nite Coaches in particular!) as soon as appreciable traffic had shifted from railroads to roads, or efforts to have one truck tractor handle multiple trailers on main roads had progressed to any extent -- certainly the reaction would not be to build truck-only roads on the railroad ROWs.  (And we have not started to discuss how trucks could handle the traditional bulk traffic that the freight railroads carried.)

As a peripheral issue, I think the likelihood of dieselization itself progressing rapidly would have been high in the latter '40s even without EMD, although I do not expect the other builders to have capitalized as quickly on the financial aspects or to have produced as good or workable a product as Dilworth's locomotives with 567 power.  The forces that made steam relatively uneconomical would have been present with or without GM, and I think there would be so little pure diversion to truck traffic that many railroads would remain as such even if considerable traffic were diverted to trucks under GM-controlled or -influenced ownership.

In fact, I would consider it likely that GM would see other builders successfully promoting diesel alternatives to steam power, and decide to acquire its own locomotive division.  That surely wouldn't be an acquisition of EMC and Winton followed by clever engineering, though.  Might be highly interesting to see where the free-piston design would go with BLH needing an unrestricted high-horsepower capability and GM only just coming into competition with their own free-piston investigations starting up.

 

[Lake]

?

[Ulrich]

I think so. Had deregulation come 20 or 30 years sooner than it did the railroads would have probably been able to avoid the mess of the 1960s and early 70s. Some, like N&W and B&O were quite profitable anyway because of coal and would have continued to do quite nicely I think with steam well into the 1980s.

Dieselization may have pushed some roads over the cliff in the 1950s. While the diesel offered many cost saving opportunities, the initial cost of purchase combined with cost of retraining staff and rejigging infrastructure during a time when trucking was poaching most of their merchadise traffic would have made the transition very difficult for some.   

[NorthWest]

Dieselization would have come a little later, but it would probably still have come. There were too many experiments (even from steam builders such as Alco, Lima and Baldwin) that showed reduced costs. The railroads still would have pushed for diesels from the steam builders.

[Paul of Covington]

   I'm not sure where you are going with this, but I'll throw out a couple of thoughts.

   As far as surviving without diesels, I think the strict pre-Staggers regulations hurt them more than anything else, so they could have done OK with steam for some time if they had been deregulated.   The combination of steam only and regulation I think would have caused the financial crises of the 1970's to happen earlier and may have brought about earlier deregulation.

   As far as EMD not promoting their products, the savings from flexibility (especially MU-ing) and from less maintenance requirements, would have made dieselization inevitable, though maybe not as fast.

[daveklepper]

Suppose GM's policy toward street railroads and interurban lines have been paralleled by a similar policy to favor trucking over freight railroads.  (There were tendencies in that direction, but that is a subject for a different posting.)  They would probably have not been the leader in streamlined passenger train power and probably would not have barnstormed the FT and done the research that made road freight locomotives possible.  And Alco and Baldwin and Lima probably would have been more than content to continue supplying steam locomotives.  What would have happened?

I have some ideas, but I would like to learn yours before presenting (and possibly modifying) mine.