ERIE, Pa. — GE workers are still assembling finished locomotives in Erie.
That’s despite a GE promise in 2017 to shift finished assembly and production from Erie to the company’s newest assembly plant near Fort Worth, Texas, by the end of 2018. Those plans are on “pause” for the time-being the representative says.
The Erie Times-News reports that unionized workers continue building locomotives and that the plant has orders to work on into 2019.
The newspaper cites a GE representative saying that the market for locomotives has increased since the 2017 announcement — for both new and remanufactured locomotives.
GE Transportation is slated to merge with Wabtec Corp. in 2019.
George Pims, the WS Journal wrote a lengthy article on Dec 14th about just that very topic. The profits generated by GE Capital were used to ‘plaster over’ the financial cracks in other business areas. GE Power used accounting gimmicks to ‘front-load’ payments from their power plant turbine service contracts, the Alstom acquisition was too costly, management/board issues discouraged hard looks at potential negative financial news, because you ‘weren’t being a team player’, etc, etc. It’s well worth the time to find and read for yourself.
Charles – That other “General” was “too big to fail,” so it was bailed out by the Feds in a fixed bankruptcy, as you surely recall. I don’t think GE is “too big to fail,” even if Obama was still President. My GE refrigerator, stove, washer, and dryer are pushing 30 and still going. GE appliances are now made by a Chinese company who bought the name. Sic Transit Gloria. P.S. to all who are part of the Newswire family, from writers to posters to readers – Happy New Year to all, and as Tug McGraw said “You gotta believe.” George
GE Medical is strong where I live (Waukesha County Wisconsin). Immigrants in my neighborhood work there. Many among us owe our very lives to those machines. GE Medical has gone a long way since they purchased a company that built X-Ray machines and grew that into something much more. As an American, it made me so proud that GE Medical’s great minds in Norway and Israel worked for an American company, and not the usual vice-versa.
GE’s problem was that it turned itself into a once-profitable financial service, like one huge bank. Medical imaging, appliances, locomotives, commercial lighting, electrical power apparatus, etc., became byproducts that never meshed with each other but all were connected to the financial company at the center.
The company made many errors that sadly are typical of big and arrogant conglomerates. Just look at the other once – dominant “General”, the one headquartered in Detroit. That other “General” also once made locomotives. Not any more.
I don’t presume to understand how GE is writhing like a worm on a hook to avoid an ultimate disaster like Penn Central, but I do know, as a stockholder, that the dividend has gone from almost a dollar (don’t have the exact figure at hand) to zero in less than a year and the stock price is now in the seven dollars and change range, along with the de-listing from the Dow. I remember when Pennsylvania Railroad was a “widows and orphans” stock, with the longest continuous dividend payment on the NYSE. I hope a book is never published called “The Wreck Of The GE,” but I’m not that smart. I do believe that there are many widows and orphans that hold GE.