ROCHELLE, Ill. — A June auction will sell off equipment from Nippon Sharyo’s former railcar manufacturing facility in Rochelle, which closed in July 2018 after eight years of operation.
The plant, which built 160 Highliner cars for Metra Electric service, closed after the company was unable to fulfill a contract for 130 Amtrak bilevel cars. [See “Nippon Sharyo closing northern Illinois railcar plant,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 14, 2018].
Cincinnati Industrial Auctioneers Inc. will handle the auction, to be held June 19-20, starting at 9 a.m. Bidders may participate in person or online, and may do in-person inspections of equipment on June 17-18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Complete details including catalogs, photos and vidoes are available at the Cincinnati Industrial Auctions website.
Equipment for sale includes robotic welders and other welding equipment, hydraulic presses, a paint booth, Trackmobiles, forklifts, trucks, and trailers.
@Paul Bouzide: a casualty of their own poor decisions. They agreed to the contract with the crush standards as doable. If it wasn’t possible, they shouldn’t have done it.
This might explain why they were the ones who won the bid, no one else has come out say they can do it either.
Was it really that the standards were too high, or was it they bid too low to make the standards work within their margin?
It was clear for Nippon Sharyo, it was an “all or nothing” deal for them. They either won the bid and try to make it work or lose the bid and close. In this case they won the bid, but couldn’t make it work, so they still closed.
The parent company refused to subsidize the effort of their subsidiary to redesign the car, so they had to close.
Very sad. A casualty of overly stringent FRA crashworthiness requirements? And no replacement for the Amtrak Midwest corridor rolling stock capacity expansion.