Max,

I worked on three different electrification studies, and the cost per ton of emissions, to do electrification for environmental reasons alone, is pretty steep.

Like the discussion of "switch costs" in the NWP thread, some folks will point to the BC operation, and say, see, it was really cheap (I believe around $25,000 a mile back in 1970's Canadian dollars???), costs for electrification along most major main lines and into and out of urbanized areas is really expensive, with costs between $3 and $20 million a mile, depending on a variety of factors, such as bridge clearances, and such (back in 90's dollars).

For a while some of the regional Air Quality Management Plans used this as the "best available control technology" assumption for complete reduction (less offsite power generation emissions) of all rail emissions. Much of this was designed to scare the crap out of the RR's and Locomotive makers, and force them clean up the then very dirty locomotive fleet.

Some folks have looked again in recent years, using things like distributed wind power, using the row as part of the electrical grid, and capturing dynamic braking to regenerate electricity back into the grid, some of this work along the BNSF (ATSF) route. But, it hasn't gotten any cheaper.

Earlier someone mentioned the idea of adjusting locomotive emissions by ton miles, and that probably makes some sense, so, of course it wasn't considered. Another good suggestion was to bundle all heavy duty emissions and allow folks to buy up "surplus" "quantifiable" emissions from other heavy duty sources which exceed Tier 4 minimum standards, this also made too much sense, and met a similar fate. It is probably time to relook at both of these strategies, which may be more cost effective in cleaning actual air, as opposed to imposing technically unsustainable standards, which result in lower fleet turnover and higher fleet emissions.

BOB2