I'm glad our board is blessed with excellent analysts. Until I read through this thread, I didn't realize that Gensets are the only locomotives ever to have caught on fire.

As a matter of record, each Genset locomotive that operates at the Roseville hump saves 500 gallons a week in fuel. Since they always operate in pairs, this means each pair saves 52,000 gallons of diesel fuel and resultant emissions yearly. I think that might be a bit more emmissions than the fire generated.

I would prefer not to go back to the years when, by August in the Santa Clara Valley you couldn't see either set of hills from San Jose, and worse in the central valley. No new motive power has ever been developed without a learning curve. The same sad laments were heard in crying rooms across the railroad when the diesel was introduced. Progress WILL happen, and flat out the Gensets represent a quantum improvement for many of the typical assignments railroads have, especially hump duty where 10 minutes of heavy pull back is followed by 50 minutes of low power pushback. As an aside, the RP20CD units outpull the SD38s by 30%, even more on wet rail. This is due to independent control of each axle.