ac6000cw
Established Member
The Southern Pacific German hydraulics may have been 154 tons, but not only do US roads expect 25 ton axleloads for adhesion with such substantial trains, they sometimes at rebuilding actually increase the weight with ballast. Additional weights inside the body have comprised both cast concrete blocks, and scrap steel pieces from old locos, welded together!
The recent new freight locos are 32+ tonne axle load.
One factor in the success of the Class 33 was that maintenance standards were higher on the Southern than on the other regions.
Visiting Class 47's from the WR and LMR were often filthy with Oil leaks everywhere.
From what I've read, BR's attitude to diesel maintenance (at least in the 1960s) was decidedly steam-age in many places - not enough spares stock, and/or spares held in works stores (instead of depots) so locos were stopped waiting for the parts to arrive, and faults not being fixed properly causing something expensive to break eventually... I also remember reading about the comments of the Wisconsin Central mechanical people when they looked around the ex-BR loco fleet of what became EWS - they were pretty appalled at both the state of the motive power (oil leaks etc.) and the poor levels of tools and equipment in the maintenance depots.
I wonder if the Southern Region attitude to maintenance was different due to it being a heavily electric system, and hence very familiar with maintaining electrical equipment (or maybe it just had better management who understood that having expensive locos standing around broken/failing on the road wasn't good business economics)?