...and what makes the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit Board of Directionless qualified to make such an assessment? I love how bureaucrats can become instantaneous experts on a subject without even the slightest experience to back it up. There's a reason conventional, locomotive-hauled trains remain predominant on America's commuter railroads; if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Scrambling for top-dollar parts for some custom, potentially foreign one-of-a-kind contraption isn't fun, and when the opportunity exists for more readily-available equipment with a universal parts market, going for anything else is just plain stupid. Go ask the LIRR how their custom, dual-mode EMD units worked for them and swap notes with Metro North, who went for the GE Genesis series.

Oh well, nothing more expected of yet another group of out to lunch local politicos: the assassins of rationale.