Life would be considerably easier were EP fitted to all our rolling stock - but, then, I imagine management would use that as an excuse to chop a zero or two from our wages!
To do a smooth platform stop at high speed, the usual procedure is to make two air brake applications. The first brings you down from line speed to platform approach speed. For this, you use the train brake (cars and loco). The second brings you down from platform approach speed to a stop. But you can't make that second application without having recharged your brake pipe. This entails releasing that first application at the right moment so that distance and track topography keep bringing down your speed while your brake pipe recharges. Your aim is to hit the platform at the right speed with a fully recharged brake pipe.
For the stop itself, you can certainly power brake - ie feed power into the traction motors with the loco brakes released and the car brakes applied. Power braking is fiddly, however, particularly with downhill stations or slippery tracks. You can't power brake with more than a minimal amount of air in the car brake cylinders. Nor can you transition too quickly from a 'bunched' train (ie with couplers compressed from a train brake application) to a 'stretched' one. Most loco platform overshoots on my network are from drivers misjudging the correct combination of power, brake cylinder pressure and station gradient.
Another option for us is the dynamic brake. This turns the traction motors into generators and produces considerable resistance when slowing down the train from line speed. But dynamic braking comes with so many limitations (30 seconds to energise and de-energise, unusable at low speeds, unusable on inclines, disables the locomotive brake, susceptible to sudden failure) that it's best treated as a bonus than a dependable driving tool. Many of our drivers spurn it and choose to rely on air alone.
