It has been, for starters, the 150th anniversary year for the company that George Westinghouse founded with his invention of the automatic air brake. Despite competition in making the practical safety devices today, air brakes are used on virtually every freight and passenger car, and locomotive in North America and used widely throughout the railroading world.
This is also the year Wabtec officially merged with GE Transportation — making it the dominant locomotive maker and railroad equipment supplier in the Western Hemisphere. The merger, which Wabtec appears to dominate, also brings to an end the historic rivalry between Westinghouse’s empire and that of his archrival Thomas Edison, who founded General Electric in the late 1800s in the same era of invention and technological aspiration.
The newly merged Wabtec-GE Transportation company weathered a substantial strike from former GE workers who demanded certain pay and benefits, moved to shutter Motive Power locomotive operations in Idaho while moving them to Pennsylvania, and followed through on launching tests for a battery-powered locomotive for main line use.
As an aside, Wabtec also opened a new headquarters building in downtown Pittsburgh — planting the flag, if you will, firmly in what was Rust Belt America.
And we like that.
Hmmm… I wonder what the top story of 2019 is? I can’t really remember anything special about the year that stood out…
Eventually Progress Rail will have their chance to shine. Just a shame they rushed their Tier 4 locomotives causing a bad impression on them. But I have seen that both PR’s Tier 4s are doing better now then before. At least PR is Not giving up, and Not dying. Progress Rail does a lot more for the Rail industry then just build new And remanufacture EMD Locomotives.
Some Railfans just gave up to soon on Progress Rail, but I’m sure that if some of these railfans walked into the production facility in Muncie, IN, they wouldn’t know where to start on these complex machines.
Plus I’m sure Progress Rail knows something that we all don’t know.