Locomotive

La Grange. The name has been synonymous with diesel locomotives since shovels met dirt in an open field adjacent to the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad in the western suburbs of Chicago on March 27, 1935. Technically the plot of land was in McCook, Ill., but the Electro-Motive Corporation locomotive factory that sprung from that fertile ground would be forever known by its La Grange, Ill., mailing address. The first factory operated by the up-and-coming locomotive builder (a subsidiary of General Motors since 1930), the Electro-Motive plant would burgeon to a sprawling 3.6 million-square-foot facility that would ultimately employ some 13,000 workers engaged in just about every aspect of locomotive building, from development and design to fabrication of components, engines, and electrical gear, to final assembly and testing. “The home of…

THE LOCOMOTIVE INDUSTRY reached a milestone in 2021 and it wasn’t a positive one. For the first time in more than 70 years, no new six-axle road locomotive was built for a Class 1 railroad in North America. The steady diet of locomotive sales of this type has paused for the first time since 1948, the year Baldwin delivered the first six-axle DRS6-6-1500 model to Chicago & North Western. How did the industry get to this point? The impact of Precision Scheduled Railroading in part or as a whole is a major factor, along with technology such as A.C. traction and distributed power, which allow railroads to run longer trains requiring fewer locomotives. The net result can be seen in the thousands of locomotives in storage or stricken from rosters during…

These are lean days for the locomotive vendors. Their domestic customers, long since dieselized, are mostly broke; and overseas competition may be gauged by the fact that the last annual of the trade press Railway Gazette carried advertising by no fewer than 42 builders. The strain of adjusting from the feast of the early 1950s to today’s famine is painfully apparent. Baldwin is out of the business and Fairbanks-Morse has had but one buyer (Mexico’s Chihuahua-Pacific) in the last few years. Alco recently felt obliged to reassure stockholders and the press that it is still in the game, and General Motors has begun building buses at its London, Ont., plant in addition to moving Detroit Diesel under the roof of Electro-Motive at La Grange, Ill. Long gone are the glory…

There oughtta be a party. Electro-Motive, one of the most significant and storied names in railroading, turns 100 this year. More than 73,000 locomotives — and counting — have carried the Electro-Motive brand since the name was first neatly lettered in gold leaf on the glass of an office door at 17th & Euclid in Cleveland, Ohio. The course was set for the future of American motive power on the 1922 day that Harold L. Hamilton and Paul Turner set up in rented office space to design and sell self-propelled gas-electric railcars. A century later, Union Pacific 3061 carries the Electro-Motive name on a tiny decal affixed to its flanks. The new-generation EMD unit fairly glistens this cool February morning as it heads a heavy southbound freight carefully easing down…

Friday, Nov. 27, 1964 — the day after Thanksgiving. After an early-morning drive to the busy Louisville & Nashville terminal at Corbin, Ky., my sights were set on a day of railroad adventure. My grandfather’s brother was the first-trick yardmaster at the north end of Corbin. Mere moments after my arrival there, Extra 835 South eased into the yard after an overnight run from Louisville. Behind the five-unit mix of EMD and Alco power came two buffer cars, then two units dead-in-tow. The teletype machine in the yard office was chattering away, spitting out a paper list of the train’s consist. GP7 No. 1753 was billed to the Clinchfield at Erwin, Tenn., so it would leave Corbin in CV No. 65’s train for Norton, Va. The second unit, F7 No.…

Rail enthusiasts have long been enamored with the locomotive technology race for more horsepower, boosted tractive effort, increased fuel efficiency, and environmental responsibility. As capability advanced, train length and weight grew in direct proportion. The science of stopping a 3-mile long, 20,000-ton monster is not something that attracts attention, but had not train brake engineering evolved as well, engine development would have been for naught. The earliest “trains” were simply horse-drawn stagecoaches controlled with a foot-operated wagon wheel brake. Horses were replaced with steam locomotives, and individual car brakes were installed, requiring brakemen to run across the tops of rolling stock to turn by hand a “stem winder” version of the old wagon brake. Early steam locomotives like the famous General were not equipped with anything other than a hand-operated…