That is at the root of the problem. Government should not have "goals" beyond providing public services in a fair and equal manner to all citizens. It is certainly beyond the purview of government to choose which energy source they approve of or to decide which vehicles anyone should be able to purchase or drive.

For a classic example, and hardly the only such instance, of how government mandates (especially unfunded ones) all too often conflict with the real world of physics, technology, and even rights, look how many times Positive Train Control had to be postponed, delayed, and modified after the government (reacting once again to a public outcry to be seen to be "doing something," this time in the wake of the Chatsworth, Ca. Metrolink/UP collision in September 2008) imposed its creation and adoption nationwide: a total of five years after its original seven-year deadline, and the final deadline was "met" with two days to spare.

Imposing technological mandates with the mentality of "figure it out" is a route to catastrophe--financial, philosophical or literal.

Incorrect.

It's government's (and by government's, I mean we the people's) job to also deal with issues involving our common interests.

Government has an interest in this for the same reason the government provides avalanche protection services. The timeline is just slightly different, and therefore, more difficult for people to connect with.

There are all sorts of things that government does to limit consumer choices (like preventing sales of alcohol to minors). It's well settled precedent.

If you don't like it, you're welcome to vote for different representation that aligns with your views, but don't pretend that it's illegitimate simply because it's not your preference.

You can also look back 100+ years to the various safety appliance acts.

But you'd be hard pressed to find a railroader today who isn't glad that grab irons are where you expect them or that airbrakes exist.

In fact, if you dig a bit deeper, you might discover that it was this very government regulation around safety appliances that contributed to the significant differences in capacity and capability between American railroads and those abroad that did not face similar "unfunded mandates".

There is a vast difference between mandating the already-proven and easy-to-apply versus mandating what hasn't been reliably proven yet.

The extension of this mentality, applied to the current discussion, is that government orders your museum/railroad to dedicate 25% of your parking spaces to EV chargers (later to rise to 50% in X number of years) and that no one else can park in these spaces except EVs. Oh, and install them at your own expense. OPh, sure, they'll give you tax credits against their installation so you can write it off all the taxes your museum pays.........

It doesn't matter whether you're in downtown Philadelphia, Strasburg, the EBT, or the Nevada Northern.

Maybe we should be changing this discussion from whether this is a good idea to what to do WHEN this mandate comes about...........

Taken to its rational extreme, an elected government at any level, no matter how slim the majority, empowers itself to ignore the U.S. Constitution for its own perception of "the common good."

Just don't be upset when the government you don't like empowers itself similarly.

Folks may remember when automobile pollution standards were first getting serious, Detroit chose to spend the research money on lawyers and lobbyists while Japan spent it on engineers.

Same mentality with small cars and planned obsolescence, then OPEC did it's thing.

Brian

Imagine the nerve. It'd be almost like being mandated to have handicap parking spaces. Whatever will we do to resist such tyranny?

Does a handicapped parking space come with a monthly electric bill, technology (possibly proprietary) that needs to be kept up to date, etc.? No. It's a sign (or a couple) and some paint.

BTW, two railfans I knew that were wheelchair-bound refused to use handicapped spots unless they had no other spaces--"I'm gonna let someone REALLY handicapped use it if he needs it!", the one would say.
Another made a career out of suing people over ADA compliance once they refused his (billable hours) offer of "ADA compliance consulting".............. including rail museums and operations.

Good evening everyone,

Wow! ... Four pages (so far) on this topic. How distressing!

It is obvious to me that depending on your political views, or your belief in the climate hoa, ... er, ... um, ... I mean "change", you will come to radically different views on this subject.

On a somewhat related topic;

I am curious to know; Since the first generation of ultra low emission locomotives are meeting the scrappers torch with such a frequency (due to their less than stellar performance capabilities), has any of the parties here who have been so strongly advocating for electric cars shown any desired to preserve some of the equally important pioneers of green locomotive technologies?

For example, .... a battery powered Rail-Power "Green Goat" would make a fascinating display. If properly displayed with accurate signage as to why it is in a museum, the exhibit would certainly illustrate for the American public the importance of debating the practicality and usefulness of this very expensive technology before making bad public policy decisions regarding unproven technologies.

Now that is an exhibit that I would enjoy seeing in a museum. I might even volunteer at such a museum so the public knows precisely why the green technology landed itself in the museum in the first place.

I return you to your debate on wasting public money and other terrible policy decisions.

I'd be fascinated to learn about ANY new technology that worked as expected first time out of the shop.

How many generations along is the 737-MAX? Can't blame public policy for that disaster.

Brian

No, but it does come with its own costs. So the point is that it is well established that there can be and should be mandates made to improve the world around us that may not always make fiscal sense when you only consider internalized costs.

And those two examples are not Germaine to the discussion. All it does is demonstrate that people aren't as smart as libertarians give them credit for.

After dabbling in libertarianism many years ago, I gave up after wondering how many committed libertarians had actually dealt with people or reality.

I'd welcome practical proven mature EV technology once produced in enough volume to make it affordable and its associated infrastructure more universally available. When anybody produces an economically feasible DIY retrofit for my old Impreza, I'll get one.

And this is the thing that people often miss.

It's impossible to wait for a technology to be fully mature before people start adopting it.

Without that adoption there will be no maturity.

And sometimes people need nudging along, or there need to be various offsets to help drive that adoption and account for the fact that it's not 100% perfect yet.

It took the US a long time to develop the current advanced omnipresent ICE vehicle infrastructure that exists today, and don't kid yourself into thinking that it was all done with private money.

In fact, the very story of the public funding of a competitor to private railroads was THE big story of railroading in the latter 20th century.

Here' I'll even write the copy. No need to have the actual failure at hand, either; a careful photo essay would do. (Same as a good railroad museum would give the Republic Starships, at least as deserving of a careful set of explanations).

The Green Goat was a failure because its designers abjectly failed to understand how real-world people expect to switch with real-world locomotives. It was not rocket science to predict just how and when the idea would fail, and that there was no 'cure' with the architecture they chose to use.

A very similar part of the same exhibit would discuss genset locomotives, and why they 'failed to thrive' even when the sociopolitical deck was stacked in their favor. Again, there were ways to 'program' their operation to achieve reasonable emissions and anticipated performance... for example by pre-scheduling engine activation, idling, and deactivation.

As I noted, we had a highly-well-thought example of 'chasing an unproven and undeveloped technology' in the development of 'national-scope' passenger ATC after 1920. The market was thrown open to competing approaches, starting in fact before the development of consumer 'electronics' for radio, with only the guaranteed market and some rather elementary performance criteria being mandated. And indeed the development during the period of implementation was (in my opinion, at least) everything that could have been expected in that era.

What suspended the effort was a sort of one-two punch: the ICC deemphasized ATC in 1928 (concentrating on grade-crossing safety instead as a more important safety priority) and then the Depression killed a great deal of the reason for government high-speed safety assurance, as well as some of the companies by then expert in it. It was quickly dusted off and renewed as the basis of the Government knee-jerk response to Naperville (although there were many, many other ominous developments either pending or said to be pending!) -- unfortunately the response wasn't to develop better tech but to live with mandated speeds, which if you weren't aware is where that peculiar 79mph speed comes from.

It is almost inconceivable to imagine a modern automobile industry predicated on how internal-combustion engine control would have developed if 'left to fulfill '70s pollution mandates'. There are reasons steam was actively considered in the comparatively-short period before pollution and low fuel consumption became government priorities. I was around for some of the lean-burn, stratified-charge, variable-venturi stuff, and how it had to be maintained and run.

The electronics that make pilot-injected GDI engines practical would not have come out of the automobile industry, at least not cost-effectively. Other trends, including competition with fabs, make the cost, the programmability, and the API development practical. It is perhaps those sorts of area that we should be directing future locomotive development toward (I note in particular that RPS in Fullerton has some interesting ideas in process.)