Electric-locomotive-maintenance cost equation

IT HAS generally been recognized that locomotive maintenance costs increase with age. However, the impact of today´s inflationary economy has materially compounded these cost increases, and some measure of them is vital to motive power replacement studies since failure to evaluate such increases properly can have serious future consequences. Fortunately, statistical methods are available which can provide reasonably accurate forecasts by means of analyzing past costs, and then projecting the developed trend into the future.