We did something similiar in Milwaukee. They wanted to upgrade the old GP-9's. In order to avoid traction problems with the new 2000 HP engines we added weight to the front and rear of the locomotive. I don't remember how much but I think it was something like 20,000 pounds. I should know this since I went on the engine occasionally to get it reweighed.

Another neat thing we did was to cut down the height of the nose so the engineer could see where he was going. Boy - you woulda thought that someone would have thought of that before the 1970's. And our friends at the FRA decided that even though the railroads run on private (their own) property that the engineers could no longer be allowed to relieve themselves off the side of the train. Guess who got to be the ****house engineer who had to try to fit a toilet into the new cut down nose of the engine?