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half of the program, that of selling our locomotives to our customers.

The most important ingredient was getting the sales organization educated and enthused and I think the various steps I've described accomplished that fairly well. We then undertook to provide our boys with some sales tools. The most important item in this category was a series of descriptive bulletins, one for each standard size of diesel-electric: 25, 45, 50(2-axle), 65 and 80 tons. The printing was tops with fine paper and a full-color cover showing the locomotive in service. This project took a couple of years to complete but when the five bulletins were available, they were said to be the finest set of apparatus bulletins in the Company. Also we prepared a set of excellent specifications to use with proposals. To finish it off, we came up with a set of handbook sheets to be used in the Company's apparatus handbook. From these sheets a salesman could sit at a customer's desk, come up with most of the pertinent information on the locomotive including the price, and sell one or more for as much as $50,000 each. The only thing he had to get from somewhere else was shipment because that was changing all the time as business picked up. 

We did little advertising, Chuck Church having sold me that it would be a waste of money because when a man wants to get a new locomotive he doesn't ordinarily pick up a magazine or newspaper and look at the ads. What we did do was to solicit articles from our customers which could be published in trade magazines and extolling the virtues of diesel-electrics in general and ours in particular. Also we wrote such articles ourselves for the trade press. One such piece of mine was used in the August 28, 1944 issue of STEEL and is included herein as an illustration. Since the trade magazines didn't ordinarily pay for such material, I was nearly floored on one occasion to receive a check for $45 from RAILWAY PURCHASES & STORES for a piece I'd written. In fact, I think this was the first time I'd ever been paid for anything I'd written and another 30 years was to pass before it would happen again.

In the locomotive article from STEEL referred to above, it will be noted there are six rather than five standard units mentioned. The sixth one is the 44-ton "railroad type" with slow-speed Caterpillar engines and is capable of higher load-factor service than the 45-tonner with Cummins engines. It would be applied to some of the more rugged industrial jobs where the 45-ton was considered not up to the service without excessive maintenance. In Fig. 7 of this article, the GE733 motor may be seen in the lower part of the picture. The motor itself is on the right and is mounted on the double-reduction gearbox, which is the portion on the left. One of the detractors of this motor in its early days before all its bugs had been eliminated, referred to it disdainfully as "a high-speed wart on a gearbox." We built thousands of them and all in all they did a fine job.