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13

MY GE WORK
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I don't think my transfer to the Transportation Engineering Department (TED) occurred immediately upon dawn of 1930. I'd been assigned the job of laying out the control for the DL&W 3-power locomotives, two of which had been ordered to be used in connection with the suburban electrification out of Hoboken (see TRAINS article at end of 1930 section). As a result, I doubt if I began up on the fourth floor of Bldg. 14 in TED before February 1st. So along about that time, I transferred to the office of S.T. (Sam) Dodd who had a section devoted to self-propelled locomotive and car equipments, railway rather than industrially oriented, and primarily gasoline and diesel engine equipped. At this point, GE had built no diesel-electric locomotives as such since their first, brief, somewhat stumbling steps in the business during the decade of the 'teens and the early twenties. However, I'm sure I handled the TED work on the DL&W 3-powers so evidently Sam Dodd's group did handle a complete locomotive under some circumstances. Sam was an aging, white-haired, white-moustached little man probably around sixty, and a very swell man to work for as well as being the kind of a gentleman that so many of the old time GE top layers seemed to be. Unfortunately, my experience working for Sam was brief because in early April Sam left for prostate surgery and was out for several months at least. In fact, I can't remember his returning although I believe he did for a short while and then retired and his job was taken over by R.D.(Rudy) Krape. The members of Sam's organization were Rudy, Frank Sahlmann, Doc Gillilan and myself as best I can recall but my memories of the TED set-up at this point are quite vague in many areas and I've had a rough time putting together a picture that I believe is reasonably accurate. This is probably the best time to describe TED as it was to be the scene of my activities, it and its successors, until I retired in 1962.

I would like to begin with the organization at Schenectady before the move to Erie in the late fall of 1929 but not having worked in the Schenectady operation and today getting two or three different versions of the organization there depending on whom I talk to, like Earl Bill or Sahlmann for example, I hesitate to try this except in the most general terms. At that time, the ^[[regular]] apparatus business of the Company was broken up into three segments: Central Station, Industrial, and Railway and there were three departments so named. Each of these largely commercial departments, had an application engineering group associated with it. In our case, there was the Railway Dept. headed by Ed Waller and the Railway Engineering Dept. headed by W.B.Potter. These three big businesses were set up on a customer oriented basis and were organized to put together packages of apparatus obtained from the various product departments and sell these packages via the district sales organization, to