Cummins has discovered a revolution in Poland. Not a political one, thankfully, because corporations get terribly nervous when the furniture starts moving. This revolution arrives on rails carrying a 2,013 kW QSK60 diesel pack in one locomotive and four X15 diesel engines in another train. The whole thing sits beneath a headline promising to “drastically” reduce carbon emissions. The engineering itself is perfectly sensible: Poland still has large stretches of railway without overhead electricity, so dual-mode trains can use the wires where they exist and diesel where they do not. Unfortunately for the marketing department, “practical transitional solution to incomplete electrification” apparently lacked sufficient revolutionary thunder. So Cummins climbed onto the platform, blew the fucking whistle and announced history.
There is something wonderfully Cummins about this. Give the company a perfectly respectable engineering achievement and somebody immediately feels compelled to inflate it until the thing is floating above the newsroom like a parade balloon. A train that switches between electricity and diesel becomes a “rail revolution”. An X15 switching off beneath overhead wires becomes part of the great decarbonisation epic. Five diesel engines distributed across two projects suddenly arrive wearing the ceremonial sash of drastically reduced carbon emissions, as though Che Guevara might have achieved more with Stage V and a fleet-maintenance contract.
All Aboard The Revolution
The first machine in Cummins’ Polish double act is PESA’s 111DEa Gama DualPower, a four-axle locomotive combining a 2,800 kW electric system with a Cummins QSK60 diesel pack producing 2,013 kW. Under catenary power it can haul passenger and freight trains at up to 160 km/h. When the wires disappear, the QSK60 takes over. Cummins says the locomotive can then continue at up to 120 km/h, with a diesel range of around 920 kilometres. PKP Intercity has ordered 16 units, with another 10 described by Cummins as being in the pipeline.
That is useful engineering. Poland does not have an entirely electrified railway. A locomotive that can remain under electric traction where infrastructure permits, then continue onto unwired routes without swapping locomotives, has obvious operational advantages. No argument there. The fun begins when Cummins refuses to leave a sensible engineering solution alone and instead announces that these projects will “drastically” reduce carbon emissions. Drastically is a magnificent word: big coat, deep pockets, plenty of room inside for a number. Curiously, the article never gives us a project-specific percentage showing how drastic that reduction actually is.
There are power outputs, speeds, ranges, order quantities and fuel-economy claims for a future-generation engine. Even the geography gets a decent airing. Yet the headline environmental boast turns up without the awkward burden of telling us precisely how much CO₂ either Polish project removes against a defined baseline. The revolution therefore departs platform one with the emissions calculator apparently still sitting beside an abandoned cappuccino in the station café.
Then Four X15s Climb Aboard
The second project is Newag’s Impuls 3 passenger train, and here Cummins supplies the most important piece of context in the article. Approximately 37% of Poland’s rail network remains non-electrified. That is the engineering reason the train carries four Cummins X15 diesel engines to bridge the gaps where overhead electrical power is unavailable.
Four X15s is not a discreet little emergency genset hiding underneath a carriage beside a discarded umbrella. Together they deliver a shade over two megawatts. Cummins says all four engines can operate when the train needs heavy acceleration or climbing power. During steadier running, one or two can operate to reduce fuel consumption. Once the train reaches electrified track, the engines shut down completely. Again, that makes perfect sense. If the alternative is diesel running where electric traction could do the work, turning the engines off beneath live catenary should save fuel and emissions. Cummins also says the arrangement can save operators millions of euros annually in fuel costs.
That is actually the interesting story. A country with incomplete electrification is buying flexible rolling stock that can exploit electrical infrastructure without becoming useless when the wires stop. Practical, clever and operationally useful. Apparently somebody in communications looked at that perfectly respectable engineering case, frowned at its lack of theatricality and thought: fuck it, fetch me the word revolution.
Five Diesels Walk Into A Decarbonisation Strategy
Put the two projects together and Cummins is celebrating a QSK60 plus four X15s. Five diesel engines sit at the centre of an article whose opening paragraph immediately reaches for drastic carbon reduction. That does not make the technology fraudulent, ridiculous or environmentally worthless. Dual-mode traction can plainly displace diesel operation wherever electrical infrastructure exists. Pretending otherwise would be just as daft as Cummins pretending the pistons have joined Greenpeace.
What it does make ridiculous is the corporate urge to describe every incremental improvement as though the smokestacks have spontaneously burst into wildflowers. The PESA locomotive still carries a 2,013 kW diesel engine because Poland has routes where it needs one. The Newag train still carries four X15s because 37% of the network remains without electrification. That is transition, and transition is messy. It involves old infrastructure, new infrastructure, capital budgets, operational compromises and equipment designed to work in both worlds.
Cummins could simply say that. Instead, the engineering gets pushed through the corporate linguistic wash plant. Diesel enters through one door and emerges twenty minutes later wearing a biodegradable lanyard, speaking earnestly about transformation and asking whether anybody has seen the sustainability report.
Destination Zero, Platform Diesel
Cummins has become exceptionally good at selling combustion engines from inside a decarbonisation narrative. The trick is not to deny that an engine burns fuel; even the communications department has not yet attempted that level of sorcery. Instead, the hardware gets wrapped in enough vocabulary about efficiency, hybridisation, lower emissions and future readiness that the reader starts wondering whether the fucking pistons are photosynthesising.
The article eventually reaches the NextGen X15, part of Cummins’ HELM platform. Cummins says the newer generation can provide up to a 10% fuel-economy improvement compared with previous generations in relevant hybrid operating cycles. That is a useful number because it demonstrates what happens when Cummins actually has a quantified improvement to advertise: it gives us one. Ten per cent. Nice, understandable and capable of being examined against whatever test conditions produced it.
Yet the opening claim that these Polish projects will “drastically” reduce carbon emissions receives no equivalent project-specific figure. Apparently “drastically” exists in a special unit of measurement somewhere between vibes, investor relations and a PowerPoint transition that makes the little train icon move across the screen.
Meet Newag, The Rising Force
Then Cummins introduces Newag as a “rising force within the European rail industry”, and this is where the carriage lights begin flickering. Newag is unquestionably a significant Polish rolling-stock manufacturer. Nothing about the current Cummins-powered Impuls 3 establishes wrongdoing. The present project is not the same technical matter that generated controversy around earlier Impuls trains, and TCAP does not need to smear one problem across another to make the story interesting.
But if Cummins chooses to introduce a company as a rising European force while discussing its latest Impuls platform, it seems entirely reasonable to inspect the corporate luggage rack. The name Impuls has previously sat at the centre of one of the strangest railway-software controversies in recent memory.
The Impuls Name Has Baggage
Security researchers from Dragon Sector were brought into a dispute involving trains that had experienced failures after maintenance outside Newag. Their analysis led to allegations that software mechanisms inside certain vehicles could trigger operational blocks under particular circumstances. Those alleged circumstances included conditions associated with locations of competing repair facilities.
That allegation did not remain buried in some obscure hacker forum beside a bloke selling stolen RuneScape accounts. It reached the Polish state. In June 2024, the Kraków Regional Prosecutor’s Office publicly confirmed an investigation concerning unauthorised changes to computer data in the control systems of dozens of Impuls vehicles. The prosecutor described software that caused vehicle blocks during normal operation. At that stage, the case remained in rem, meaning an investigation into the matter rather than charges against a particular person, and nobody had been formally charged.
Newag has vigorously rejected the accusations. Its December 2023 statement denied inserting solutions intended to cause deliberate failures and accused competitors and researchers of spreading manipulated claims. That distinction matters because TCAP does not need a fake conviction where the actual dispute is already weird enough. A railway manufacturer said absolutely not, cybersecurity researchers said look at the code, and Polish prosecutors opened an investigation into unauthorised control-system changes. Newag also pursued civil litigation against the maintenance company SPS and members of Dragon Sector. That is already several stations beyond ordinary corporate awkwardness.
Rising Force, Meet Litigation Timetable
Newag’s later reporting confirms that the dispute did not evaporate once the headlines moved on. By the first half of 2025, the group reported two civil proceedings involving SPS and Dragon Sector members. One concerned alleged infringements of intellectual-property rights and unfair competition. Another involved personal-rights issues and unfair competition. The reported claim values were PLN 5.82 million and PLN 5.10 million respectively.
A later market report said that, as of June 2025, neither case had produced a judgment or settlement and no financial penalties had been imposed. Nobody needs to overcook this. Cummins’ phrase is funny enough once placed next to the history: “Newag, a rising force within the European rail industry.” Indeed. Rising through rolling-stock orders, hybrid traction, European expansion and one of the most surreal software disputes ever to wander into a locomotive depot. Corporate biographies contain multitudes.
None of this establishes anything sinister about the four Cummins X15 engines in the new Impuls 3. There is no evidence in the material TCAP reviewed that those engines have anything whatsoever to do with the disputed software history. Different issue, different project, different generation. The relevance is reputational and editorial. Cummins coupled its promotional wagon to Newag, called the company a rising force and invited everybody to admire the view. Unfortunately, railway couplings work in both directions. Sometimes you inherit the scenery.
Meanwhile, The QSK60 Is Just Sitting There Being Enormous
The PESA side is less scandalous and arguably funnier because of its sheer mechanical honesty. A QSK60 is not an apologetic little motor pretending to be an electric toothbrush. It is an enormous high-output diesel engine. In PESA’s DualPower application, Cummins says it produces 2,013 kW.
There is something refreshing about that much metal appearing inside an article coated in climate language. The QSK60 does not care about the communications strategy. It has cylinders to fill, fuel to burn and a locomotive to drag across whichever section of Polish railway has run out of overhead wires. It is the brutally practical answer to a brutally practical problem.
Poland still has unelectrified track. PESA wants a locomotive that remains useful when the catenary ends. Therefore somebody installs a bloody great diesel engine. Nobody needs to apologise for admitting that. The embarrassing part is the corporate reflex that cannot describe an engineering compromise without dressing it as the storming of the Winter Palace. Sometimes a huge diesel engine is simply a huge diesel engine doing something useful because infrastructure has not caught up yet. Marx can remain in the library.
Thirty-Seven Per Cent Is The Actual Story
The most important number in the whole article may not be a power output at all. It is 37%, Cummins’ figure for the proportion of Poland’s rail network remaining non-electrified. Everything else flows from it. If the network were fully electrified, hauling tonnes of diesel machinery around under permanently live wires would make considerably less sense. But it is not fully electrified, so operators need equipment capable of spanning both systems.
That is the adult version of the story. Infrastructure changes slowly and rolling stock lasts decades. Operators cannot teleport passengers and freight across gaps in the catenary. Dual-mode technology therefore lets them use lower-emission electric traction where possible without sacrificing network coverage elsewhere. It is a perfectly defensible technological bridge between the railway Poland has today and the one it may eventually build.
Quite a good article, really, if somebody had resisted tipping a bucket of revolution over it.
Drastically, Apparently
TCAP keeps returning to that word because Cummins put it right at the front of the train. The projects, we are told, promise to “drastically reduce carbon emissions”. Compared with what? Over which routes? Across which duty cycles? By what percentage? For the PESA locomotive specifically? For Impuls 3? Across the lifetime of the vehicles? Per passenger kilometre? Per train kilometre?
The article does not say. That absence does not prove the reductions are insignificant. They may be substantial, particularly where diesel operation is replaced by electricity over long portions of a route. But if you choose an adverb as muscular as drastically, it is not unreasonable for somebody to wander over carrying a calculator and ask whether the adjective brought any numbers with it.
Corporate sustainability language has developed a peculiar immunity to measurement. An engine producing 2,013 kW comes with a number. A claimed range of 920 kilometres comes with another. When carbon emissions fall drastically, however, suddenly we are all fucking poets.
From Overhead Wires To Overheated Copy
This is what makes Cummins’ newsroom such an endlessly productive little mine shaft. Buried beneath the adjectives there is often genuinely interesting engineering. The PESA DualPower sounds useful, and so does the Newag Impuls 3. Shutting diesel engines down beneath electrified infrastructure is plainly more sensible than burning fuel while perfectly good electrical power hangs above the roof. Flexible rolling stock may also let operators serve routes that would otherwise require awkward equipment changes.
All of that can be said without pretending five diesel engines have joined Extinction Rebellion. Yet Cummins repeatedly seems incapable of leaving respectable engineering alone. Everything must be pioneering, transformative or revolutionary. Each efficiency gain becomes another sunrise over the corporate horizon, while every combustion engine receives a sustainability escort to the ballroom. Somebody pins a green rosette to the bonnet and hopes nobody asks whether there is still diesel in the tank.
Sooner or later, somebody has to ask whether the prose itself is producing more emissions than the machinery.
A Revolution With A Fuel Tank
Perhaps the funniest feature of this Polish rail revolution is that Cummins has accidentally written a decent argument for why the transition away from diesel is difficult. Thirty-seven per cent of the network lacks electrification, so diesel remains operationally useful. New vehicles bridge that infrastructure gap by combining traction systems. As the network changes, combustion can potentially do less work.
That is not failure. It is how transitions actually happen. But it also means Cummins should stop behaving as though attaching a diesel engine to an electrically capable train constitutes the arrival of some immaculate carbon messiah. The technology is transitional because the fucking railway is transitional. The QSK60 exists because the wires stop. Four X15s exist for the same reason. When the wires return, those engines shut down. There is your story, complete and respectable, without incense, revolutionary banners or a brass band.
Next Stop: Marketing
So what has Cummins actually given Poland? PESA gets a powerful dual-mode locomotive capable of electric and diesel operation. Newag gets four X15s packaged into a passenger train capable of serving both electrified and non-electrified routes. Operators get flexibility, passengers get through journeys, and fuel use should fall where engines can shut down beneath overhead power. All sensible and all useful.
Then marketing climbs aboard without a ticket and starts screaming REVOLUTION from the luggage rack.
The article gives us a QSK60, four X15 engines, 135 engines in Newag’s initial order, a future NextGen X15, a 37% infrastructure gap and an unquantified promise of drastic carbon reduction. It also introduces Newag as a rising European rail force without mentioning that the company’s earlier Impuls trains became the centre of allegations about software-induced operational blocks. Those allegations led to a Polish prosecutorial investigation and multimillion-zloty civil litigation that Newag itself has vigorously pursued while denying the underlying accusations.
That is a hell of a journey for one newsroom article, and TCAP did not even need to pull the emergency brake.
Cummins wanted a rail revolution. Fine. Four X15s, one QSK60 and a fucking thesaurus have arrived at the platform. Mind the gap between the engineering and the copy.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins – Cummins Powers Polish Rail Revolution
- Kraków Regional Prosecutor’s Office – Investigation Into Unauthorised Changes To Data In Impuls Vehicle Control Systems
- NEWAG – Statement Of 6 December 2023
- Polish Parliament – Interpellation On Impuls Train Cybersecurity
- Polish Parliament – Paulina Matysiak Interpellation On Impuls Control Systems
- NEWAG Group – Half-Year 2025 Management Report