In the Indian case, Alco was prepared to enter into a licensing agreement that supported eventual complete locomotive manufacture in India including the Alco 251 engine. At the time, EMD, who had also supplied complete locomotives to India, was not prepared to license the building of its 567-series engine. That difference may well have tilted the balance in favour of Alco. On the electrical equipment side, a similar licence was entered into with AEI of the UK, who had become an electrical equipment supplier to Alco in 1959. This licence covered electric locomotives and EMU equipment as well as that for diesel-electric locomotives, so was probably more comprehensive than could have been offered by EMD at the time. (Also, EMD electrical technology of the era was probably not the best of starting points upon which to build a new industry.) Hitherto Indian DC electric locomotives had come from English Electric and Hitachi, with some derivative local builds. Anyway, the two licenses (both dating from 1962) covered a wide range of Indian Railways requirements, diesel and electric, and the balance between the USA and UK principals, even if happenstance, may have suited the general non-alignment position of India at that time.
In some ways, India chose well. The way that Alco’s future turned out probably gave it much freer rein when it came to future diesel locomotive development. And AEI seemed to have had a fairly relaxed attitude that likely became more relaxed after it was absorbed by GEC in 1968.
In Australia, local manufacture with maximum local content was an imperative. The Commonwealth preference was still operative in the 1950s, and as well dollars were in scarce supply. EMD was the first to set up an Australian licensee (Clyde-GM), with Alco following somewhat later (Goodwin-Alco). Initially the electrical equipment for the Goodwin-Alco locomotives was supplied by Australian GE (AGE), some of it locally manufactured. Ownership of AGE then passed to AEI UK, who from 1959 could supply, from Australian manufacture, a full range of electrical equipment for Alco locomotives. Considering that Clyde-GM got there before it with Australian manufacture, Goodwin-Alco did well to catch up. In the NSWGR case, I understand that Clyde-GM got itself wrong sided with the customer over the 42 class order, and was on the outside looking in for many years after that. Allegedly the 42 was overweight, rode and tracked a lot more roughly than the smooth 44 class (Alco DL500 model), and consumed more fuel for the same work. The Alco might have been better in reliability and availability terms, too. Of course, if there was an institutional bias in favour of Alco, then the Alco fleet might have received better treatment, whereas the much smaller EMD fleet were second-class citizens.
Still, one could say that the Alco DL500 was a very good fit, in terms of power, weight and profile, for the Australian standard and broad gauge road requirements. And it was designed to be that way; it was not an adaptation of a standard US domestic model. On the other hand, Alco did not make any real inroads into the Australian Cape gauge market, which supports the notion that it hadn’t sized its export products for this requirement, hence its lack of success in central and southern Africa. South Australian Railways had some Cape gauge DL531 models, but then its DL531 fleet operated on all three gauges.
Canada seems to have been a mixed bag when it came to transportation technology in the couple of decades or so following WWII. Certainly there was some British leaning on the aviation side. As well as the DC-4M case, TCA bought the Vickers Vanguard and CP bought the Bristol Britannia, both models that had (predictably) very limited markets. TCA specified Rolls Royce Conway engines for its DC-8 fleet, and was the first airline to specify this engine for any DC-8 or 707. CP followed suit for its DC-8 fleet. (TCA made an early change to the P&W JT3D, but CP must have been about the last customer to acquire a new Conway-engined DC-8.) Rail and road largely followed US practice much more than British practice. Heavy rail transit was something of an exception, and Toronto had some British-built cars as well as using the AEI (BTH) PCM control in some locally built units. (BTH of course developed its MU version of PCM from the GE single-car original.) Toronto was also an early use of the British Westinghouse Westcode EP braking system. Post-WWII Canadian streetcars were of the US PCC type, and trolleycoaches followed the US Brill pattern with GE motors and MRC (aka “jerkomatic”) control. (There it might have been better to have adopted British technology.) Transit and highway buses followed the US pattern, albeit with some use of British diesel engines. (CCF used AEC diesel engines, one hopes with locally-specified cooling systems of adequate capacity.)
The Canadian railroads had used US-type steam locomotives. It is difficult to imagine that the UK builders could have produced comparable units, and the tendency of some of the those builders to stay with Victorian-era mechanical construction unless forced (often reluctantly) to do otherwise by their customers would not have made them obvious candidates. Then when CN and CP were ready to buy diesels in quantity, the British builders were hardly geared up to supply in quantity. Rather they were still very much on the early learning curve, endeavouring to develop their products on the basis of small and sporadic export orders, for which in-service performance feedback was not always easy to obtain, there being no domestic market at the time. (Those were UK’s “export or die” years, during which, in respect of rail and road transport at least, those in authority appeared to have worked very hard to ensure the maximum disparity between domestic and overseas market product requirements, so making it doubly hard for the manufacturers. In the rail case, BR’s failure to start a dieselization programme circa 1948 was not really the result of an intelligent policy decision, but the outcome of a power structure that allowed a political engineering appointee (who was something of a joke) to ignore the guidance of those above him and satisfy his own ego-driven need to build a new range of steam locomotives (which needless to say retained some of the Victorian-era mechanical precepts, in part because of capability limitations in BR’s inherited workshops.) The first British main line diesel locomotive type that could be said to have been a really good performer was the Rhodesian Railways DE2 class, built by English Electric in 1955. (Even late in their lives, they were matching or even bettering the younger GE U20C DE6 class in terms of monthly mileages when used on the same services. And the U20C was something of a “gold standard” in the Cape gauge world in the 1960s and 1970s.) But by 1955 the Canadian roads were well into dieselization, and had already made their supplier choices.
Cheers,