Tech Info about BB 8 axle loco please .

Don’t know what has been done in the last 10 years since I retired but as far as I know there was no serious look at that, a customer would have to have expressed in interest first, and as noted above, they seem very happy with 4400HP locomotives.

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From what I’ve read the issue with having a small number of high horsepower/high tractive effort units is total vs partial train failures if any of them give up the ghost .
I guess it was different when you had say 6 SD40s being replaced by 3 higher powered AC drive units . If you replace 3 4400 Hp ACs with 2 5-6000 Hp units and one fails very probably game over .
The other thing is that it’s easier to roster an adequate number of 4400 ACs and not have too much excessive horsepower - fuel burn .
Also standardisation can make maintenance less costly than having small numbers of sooped up specials .

Excess horsepower is great for high speed services , but when you can strong arm the market to reduce running costs speed isn’t a priority .

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The reality on my territory was that the only trains that were ‘over powered’ were empty hopper trains that were headed back to a coal marshalling terminal. All merchandise, intermodal, auto rack, bulk commodity were dead on track with a single engine failure - 4 axle or 6 axle; AC or DC. When a engine failure happened, the first thing that was looked for was an empty hopper train headed back to the mine. If you were lucky, the failure did not happen on the ruling grade and the train could still move to a place where it could be ‘out of the way’ until additional power was secured for it.