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diminished horespower in rebuilds
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Gabe: <br /> <br />By the late 1950s, many of the problems that confronted Alco and EMD were moot, particularly metallurgy, and there was broad experience with light-weight, medium-speed diesel engines that did not exist in 1940. GE could purchase some of this experience, and a lot of it, such as metallurgy, they could get for free from the steel and alloy metal companies or by simply looking in the trade journals and inferring from one application into another similar application. Plus, GE had deep pockets to fund a detailed R&D project almost no matter how long it took. GE didn't need to build any locomotives to meet payroll, but Alco absolutely had to get product out the door or go broke, so Alco was really between a rock and a hard place. <br /> <br />GE's timing was very good. They waited until EMD, Alco, F-M, and a host of other companies had done all the exploratory work in this unknown field, but not so long that the market was completely done. The best analogy I can think of is the man who lets the pioneers go out and do battle with the Indians and the grizzly bears, and then stakes his claim on the last of the good land. Poor Alco was pretty shot full of holes by that time, but it wasn't like they had much choice. Their window of opportunity was in the 1930-1939 time frame, but I'm not even sure that even if they had seen the light on January 1, 1930 -- a light which they did not see -- that they would have had the cash flow through the depression to bring it off. GE was using its cash flow from other mature divisions to fund an expensive and risky venture into locomotives, exactly as GM had done. <br /> <br />OS
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