I was once told by an old head conductor - when the railroad starts screwing up, open your pockets because you are going to make some money.

I can't understand why anyone would have even tried such a worthless attempt to haul too big of a train up a hill. It always amuses me when some idiot engineer tries to take a run at it. I can only think of one place where the hills were short enough on the east end that if you could take a run at it you might have been able to get more cars across. But anything over 12 mph and you would be on the ground, and BN eventually put a 27 car limit for loads which one unit could handle, and only nights in the summer. The rest of the time - hit the hill at 90 mph if you want, you will still stall on the hill. One railroad I was engineer on if we didn't think we were going to make it, we would stop in the sag at the bottom. No need to get to crazy with handbrakes because they couldn't go anywhere. Run light engine up the hill knocking off the snow/frost/whatever, then sand back down the hill to our train. I don't ever remember stalling out after we had done that. Sure beats backing down or trying to double.

Where else besides the NWP did they try the MATE set? I could see that the reason for those tests allowed the decision makers an easy day trip from Market Street. They must have been impressed enough at some point to have committed to the TEBU program. SP used the TEBU sets on the Oregon coast branches, Arizona ore lines and the Texas rock trains(?). Anywhere else, and strangely not the NWP?

The basic concept of the MATE/TEBU is good. Get the same tractive effort as two six axle units without the wheel/track wear or maintaining a third full four axle loco. I think the MATE idea had a couple flaws. First, GE wanted SP to buy a brand new MATE, when I bet SP rebuilt the junk U25Bs into TEBUs for far less. A loco at around 30-35 tons an axle can handle 500 hp without any extraordinary (AC, Super Series, etc) EMDs from the GP30/35 through the Dash 2 line will derate the traction output at low speeds ((including the SD45). This was originally an option (Power Matching) to allow newer high horsepower per axle units to be able to run with older units, but apparently it became standard. GE was a little more optimistic than EMD and while GEs did derate, they seemed to have been a little hotter to try to get more tractive effort. All the comments I have ever heard is that the high horsepower GE Universals and Dash 7s were all "slippery". My preference is for a unit to almost slip and creep a little because once you start constantly slipping you are in trouble. Some of todays designs seem to take this to the extreme, either creeping along (gen-sets) or going nuts (GEVO C-4). Even if the MATES were working, a U36B mother would have too much power at 10 mph to use full horsepower. Too bad they don't teach engineers (and the power board) the basic physics of tractive effort and various tricks the locomotives pull. A conductor I used to work with is now going through engineer's training. There are two rock trains - one with a set of SD40-2s and the other with GP50s. Nobody had explained to him what the transition is on the SD40-2, or that GP50s will derate with no indication once the traction motors get hot.

Who knows what the microprocessor controlled locos do. I bet there is a million lines of buggy code written by an overpaid geek that has no clue what a train is....