8th Notch wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:26 am
They were a recipe for disaster to begin with! The T units weren’t worked anywhere near as much as the freight units yet they were both always shop queens. I enjoyed them for the the great visibility and quieter cabs they had but that was about it. T maintenance and Gensets def weren’t a good match.
I think I read somewhere that the standard maintenance procedure on them involve removing the individual engine needing work done, swapping it with a spare (of which zero were purchased for the MBTA) to keep it in service with little downtime, while the now-removed engine becomes the spare once the work has been done. The problem with this is that this method of maintenance is that I don't think the MBTA is well equipped to do things this way. As mentioned in the thread I linked above, freigh railroads like BNSF had to fabricate cradles to hold the engines after they removed them in order to move them and work on them easily.
If I remember correctly, one of the gensets (3249?) had one engine go bad and was running around on only two engines for a while.
As the MBTA has found out the hard way, (as mentioned years ago here on this forum) the lower high-speed tractive effort on the gensets also make them terrible for rescue power where the passengers stay on the train, making all the schedueld stops while being pulled by the genset, relegating them to work train and yard switcher use.