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22

With one exception, that pretty well covers the small diesel builders. The exception was the Brookville Locomotive Co. of Brookville, Pa., a small town about 100 miles southeast of Erie. I never visited their plant but had them under my wing in WPB and they were quite an outfit. I don't believe their factory was much bigger than a fair-sized garage from what I was told, but they made a line of small mechanical drive locomotives up to say 15 tons and had quite a business. It was a very informal operation. They used very few drawings because, as Mr. Eiseman, the boss, explained, "Our folks don't need drawings because they've been building these little engines a long time and they can remember just how to do it." This was no outfit to be told by the government how they had to run their business, just how much material they could buy, what they could schedule and when, and so on. We did the best we could for them but they got fed up with the red tape and finally chose to go out of business so I was told. But my point here is that they were not a GE competitor because their largest size and our smallest were relatively far apart.
Let it not be thought that GE's progress in the small diesel business was always a bed of roses because we had our problems and plenty of them. We'd been one of the pioneers in the development of the diesel-electric locomotive and in the business two decades or more by 1941 but this experience had been with larger switchers adapted primarily to Class I railroad service. The engines were slow speed and heavy as was the electrical apparatus. What we were playing with now was a new bag of tricks. The engines ran two to four times as fast and to cut cost and weight, the electrical equipment had been speeded up in about the same way. The traction motor was the GE1204 which was a trolley coach motor, fast, small and cheap. To use it, we had to drive the locomotive axles through a double-reduction gearbox. The motor was a good machine but the gearbox proved to be a cobbled-up affair that failed to do the job reliably. This problem existed on our 20, 43 and 50-ton 2-axle units. To extricate ourselves from this headache, we developed a complete new motor with integral gearbox and the finest anti-friction bearing arrangement to be had. But this takes time and money, perhaps a year and $100,000 respectively. In the meantime we struggled.
One episode which indelibly recorded the GE1204 troubles on my mind was a trip that Hubert Gouldthorpe and I took to the Du Pont plant at Charlestown, Indiana across the Ohio from Louisville, where we stayed. It was in the spring of 1941 and Du Pont had been operating one of our 43-tonners with GE1204s with nothing but trouble, particularly gearboxes with excessive wear and burned-out bearings. Maybe there were two or three locomotives now I think of it some more. At any rate Du Pont had reached the end of their patience and complained via Wilmington headquarters the trouble was intolerable and we had to do something to correct it and they weren't fooling. Du Pont

Transcription Notes:
Transcription typo: '42' to '43'