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Comment on Ask HN: What would you do with a 130 ton locomotive?

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These will absolutely be bought by a smaller freight rail company even if for spare parts. The requirement to disable the engine is wasteful.

Eg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Shorthaul_Railroad still runs 75 year old diesel locomotives since the tech hasn’t changed that much. This is common in the industry. The caltrain models are positively leading edge since they are only 40years old.

Suggesting a use other than continuing as a freight car for such a young model of diesel locomotive is like putting an iPhone 16 in an ancient history museum. It’s crazy talk.

The requirement to disable the engine is wasteful.

I wonder what the disabling process is. During the wasteful “cash for clunkers”, the common method was to replace the oil with a polymerizing solution and rev it until it fails, but I wonder how consistently this was actually done and how many parts can be re-used.

I also wonder what this did to the market for used engines already in inventory.

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