Built in the Lorain Ford Plant-
Don't get your hopes too high. The back pages of the Diesel Spotter's Guide have any number of builders who built a handful of locomotives then closed up shop.
Including Morrison Knudsen who had big money and bowed out
Dang! And here I was hoping Lima Locomotive Works was coming back with some updated steam superpower!
CandOforprogress2 Including Morrison Knudsen who had big money and bowed out
Morrison-Knudsen spun off its locomotive division as Motive Power Industries, which is now a subsidiary of Wabtec and is quite active.
Here's an interesting discussion on RyPN, including some commentary from Jack, concerning the proof-of-concept locomotive for LeanandGreen (LOCX 1005) back in 2011.
http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=31605&hilit=washington+cog
And here is a link to the Ohio Locomotive "official" Facebook page. (There appear to have been no updates posted after the middle of April 2016...)
https://www.facebook.com/ohiolocomotiveworks/
How hokey can you be, the head boy out there in bib overalls that have never seen a speck of dirt, worn by a man who has likely never seen a speck of dirt?
tdmidgetHow hokey can you be, the head boy out there in bib overalls that have never seen a speck of dirt, worn by a man who has likely never seen a speck of dirt?
Well he could have gone to Nordstrom and bought some 'pre dirted' jeans for a exhorbitant price.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39714301
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
So you're telling me that I can make big bucks by convincing people to get into mud fights and selling the jeans they wear?
I've noticed a lot of rebuild contracts have been awarded to MPI, in addition to the good amount of MPXpress passenger locomotives out there; they also built Amtrak's newest switchers! Not quite a third big manufacturer, but they're clearly doing pretty well for themselves.
CSSHEGEWISCH Don't get your hopes too high. The back pages of the Diesel Spotter's Guide have any number of builders who built a handful of locomotives then closed up shop.
Johnny
DeggestyWhat was that company in Pascagoula (I think that is where it was), Mississippi, that built one locomotive?
A little bit bigger company than you're probably thinking: Ingalls Shipbuilding, no?
RME Deggesty What was that company in Pascagoula (I think that is where it was), Mississippi, that built one locomotive? A little bit bigger company than you're probably thinking: Ingalls Shipbuilding, no?
Deggesty What was that company in Pascagoula (I think that is where it was), Mississippi, that built one locomotive?
You're right, Ingalls Shipbuilding built one locomotive which eventually was sold to GM&O. I would surmise that Ingalls was looking for uses for what became excess manufacturing capacity after V-J day.
CSSHEGEWISCH RME Deggesty What was that company in Pascagoula (I think that is where it was), Mississippi, that built one locomotive? A little bit bigger company than you're probably thinking: Ingalls Shipbuilding, no? You're right, Ingalls Shipbuilding built one locomotive which eventually was sold to GM&O. I would surmise that Ingalls was looking for uses for what became excess manufacturing capacity after V-J day.
That engine always had an extremely odd appearance to me.
Deggesty CSSHEGEWISCH RME Deggesty A little bit bigger company than you're probably thinking: Ingalls Shipbuilding, no? You're right, Ingalls Shipbuilding built one locomotive which eventually was sold to GM&O. I would surmise that Ingalls was looking for uses for what became excess manufacturing capacity after V-J day. Thanks, Paul; the name was behind a closed door in my mind. Ingalls still is in business, and apparently is thriving, as it is hiring. That engine always had an extremely odd appearance to me.
CSSHEGEWISCH RME Deggesty A little bit bigger company than you're probably thinking: Ingalls Shipbuilding, no? You're right, Ingalls Shipbuilding built one locomotive which eventually was sold to GM&O. I would surmise that Ingalls was looking for uses for what became excess manufacturing capacity after V-J day.
RME Deggesty A little bit bigger company than you're probably thinking: Ingalls Shipbuilding, no?
Deggesty
Thanks, Paul; the name was behind a closed door in my mind. Ingalls still is in business, and apparently is thriving, as it is hiring.
Save
Ingalls also built covered hopper cars in the late 1970s or early 1980s. seems they do this kind of thing when the Navy and Coast Guard contracts slow down.
Any company which hopes to go head-to-head with GE and EMD is not likely to be successful. A company which has some expertise in new technology that the big companies don't have, or which has identified a niche market, might be in with a chance.
The big boys are not immune to being ousted from the market. Think of the fate of the once mighty Baldwin Locomotive Works when diesel power came along. Big companies can become dangerously complacent about potential competitors - Baldwins in the 1930s dismissed the potential of diesel locomotives out of hand and so neglected R & D into the new motive power until it was too late.
Companies involved in military and naval manufacturing represent one potential source of new entrants in the rail market since a lot of money is spent on defense R & D and some of the spin-offs of this could be relevant to rail use. One example is high-performance diesel engines. In 1955 a 3300 hp locomotive weighing just 105 long tons was built in Britain for high-speed passenger trains. Twenty-two of this class of loco were built and were the backbone of Inter-City services from London to Scotland for many years. The locomotive used two 1650 hp Napier Deltic engines which had been developed for use in naval patrol boats.
Then there was or is MK Rail-
Morrison-Knudsen established a separate rail division, MK Rail, in 1972.[15] MK built the Caltrans California Cars (1994–96) as well as other rail passenger cars and light rail.[16] It also built locomotives, originally under its own name and later under subsidiary MK Rail from 1994 to 1996, such as the MK5000C and the F40PHM-2C. MK also rebuilt locomotives, including the four Delaware & Hudson ALCO PAs. Its Australian operation, based in Whyalla, South Australia, rebuilt 17 CL and eight AL class locomotives for Australian National and six DE class locomotives for BHP in the 1990s.[17] It rebuilt four Southern Pacific U25Bs with a Sulzer V-12 prime mover. These locomotives, designated M-K TE70-4S, operated from 1978 to 1987.[18]
MK was also one of the largest passenger railcar builders, located at the former Erie Railroad shop in Hornell, New York, overhauling and rebuilding many New York City Transit subway cars between 1984 and 1992 including R26/R28s, R29s, R32s (Phase I & II), some R36 World's Fair cars (pilot program), R42s, R44s, and R46s. It also overhauled NJ Transit's Arrow I series cars, converting from electric MUs to push-pull coaches, and SEPTA's Silverliner II and III series electric commuter cars in the late 1980s.[citation needed] The CTA 3200 series and Metro-North M-6 "Cosmopolitan" cars were built by MK in 1992-1994.[citation needed]
Morrison-Knudsen spun-off MK Rail in 1993; it became a publicly traded company in 1994. After Morrison-Knudsen's bankruptcy in 1996 the company renamed itself MotivePower Industries, doing business as Boise Locomotive. The company merged with Westinghouse Air Brake Company in 1999 to form the Wabtec Corporation. MotivePower is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Wabtec.[15]
"Look out G.E"?
How so? The company in the video is a remanufacturer of older locomotives, as such they have a number of competitors in the market.
They are not offering new build locomotives so any GE/Progress comparisons are absurd..
"I Often Dream of Trains"-From the Album of the Same Name by Robyn Hitchcock
IslandManBaldwins in the 1930s dismissed the potential of diesel locomotives out of hand and so neglected R & D into the new motive power until it was too late.
You must not know much about BLW to make a claim like that. Baldwin was involved with some of the earliest practical large-diesel locomotive research, in the 1920s, and of course produced the first practical single-unit 6000hp locomotive design before the United States entered WWII. Arguably they played a bit of 'you bet your company' with the Hamilton, then Lima-Hamilton idea of a free-piston gas turbine locomotive, and lost ... and gave up on the modular small engine idea (with the 412 and then 408 engines) as uneconomical at the time ... and then tried a dead-end market with lightweight passenger locomotives with Mekydro transmissions ... but none of that particularly qualifies as 'neglected R&D' by any rational standard. If you look back with 20/20 hindsight from well into second-generation locomotive adoption, you could claim that the principle of heavy slow-speed engines that couldn't be extensively horsepower-increased was a R&D 'dead end', but it certainly worked well enough for license-built versions of the engine to see long production (Cockerill's in Belgium, iirc.)
Where Baldwin failed so badly was in adopting some of its traditional steam-locomotive production values to diesel-electric practice ... lots of little connections, hose connections to many things in the lube system that leaked and oozed, electrical wiring run in sealed-bottom channels under the floor that soon pickled in a soup of leaked lubricant ... manuals and parts lists specific in many cases right to individual locomotive level ... the list is long, and doesn't bear much comparison to the things EMD was implementing at the time.
Meanwhile, of course, research into new conventional reciprocating steam locomotives had essentially ceased right around the time every other builder's did -- and I don't consider BCR's coal turbine to be a steam locomotive in the sense of its being a conventional substitute for diesel R&D. Certainly by the time the N&W turbine developed into the TE-1 what you had -- both pro and con, as it turned out -- was essentially a diesel-electric with a steam plant substituted to turn the main generators. (And arguably it was the Westinghouse contributions, not the Baldwin tech, that caused the most egregious failures of that design...)
IslandMan makes a valid point, though about Baldwin's attitude. At a time when 300 HP switchers were all that was being built, Baldwin's insistence on building a 1000 HP road locomotive was unrealistic.
RME probably hits the nail on the head, though, with Baldwin's design and construction practices. As Jerry Pinkepank opined, they didn't realize that diesel locomotives required a bit more attention to detail.
CSSHEGEWISCHIslandMan makes a valid point, though about Baldwin's attitude. At a time when 300 HP switchers were all that was being built, Baldwin's insistence on building a 1000 HP road locomotive was unrealistic.
Thing is, he's making just the opposite point: that Baldwin was putatively devoted to big steam and actively deprecating any sort of large diesel road power meant to compete with it. And while that may be Vauclain's attitude on occasion, or the gist of some Baldwin marketing or sales-department arrogance, it doesn't apply to Baldwin R&D or to Baldwin attempts to build road-scale internal-combustion power even when the state-of-the-art in engine design was inadequate.
It occurs to me that practical engines for 'that' scale of power, well above "1000hp" clearly existed in the early Twenties: iirc Baldwin was looking at Beardmore 'dirigible' engines (such as the type that ultimately came to be used in the CN 9000-9001 set) as early as 1923. The problem was largely understood as cost -- both first cost and the necessary better facilities and skilled labor necessary to keep the locomotives running. It is largely when the 'assumed' advantages of low-cost and unskilled labor began to be increasingly reduced in the late '40s that things went strongly in favor of road dieselization over modern steam, and I think this is in many respects independent of the actual technical advantages of dieselization in that general era. (The point has also been made, and I think it's correct, that the far better general financial picture for railroads in the immediate postwar period led to easier capital access for the grossly higher cost per drawbar HP characteristic of any of the first-generation diesel electrics; it's interesting to look at something like Trostel's history of BLW in this era to see why they didn't try to do more with Essl's design instead of going to lightweight carbodies on trucks with nose-suspended motors a la EMD.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.