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I'd spent much of 1940 working on the program to get a substantial load of strictly defense work into the plant and this program was shaping up very well by 1941. We had been awarded large quantities of pack howitzers and 5-inch 38-caliber gun mounts while a marine turbine program was developing and we were fooling around with electric-drive medium tanks. Many of the details of these projects may be found in my 1940 diary. But with my new job, all that defense work was over as far as I was concerned. However, perhaps as an offshoot of the defense activities I'd been in, which had taken me a good deal to Washington, I became sort of the No. 1 Washington contact man for the Erie Works locomotive program. And this fitted in well with the fact that most of our locomotive work was in Industrial Haulage. So I gradually got sucked into one of the most interesting experiences of my career including about nine months service as a government employee on a dollar-a-year job in the War Production Board. However, the WPB stint was not to come until 1942.
We hadn't advanced far into 1941 when it was becoming evident that the locomotive business, and particularly that part of it involved in Army, Navy, and defense contractor work, was picking up rapidly. We went very quickly from a period of worrying about having enough orders to absorb the locomotives we had ordered for stock to worrying about having enough on stock order to handle the demand. Small locomotives were suddenly in short supply and since they were needed to support the war preparedness effort, the federal government instituted a priority program to attempt to channel them to where they were most needed. And this in turn put the pressure on the builders to increase their output. Our capacity was nominally six small locomotives a week exclusive of our mining locomotive program. We wanted desperately to raise it to ten per week and quickly. This was done mainly by design changes which afforded greater standardization of components and utilized far more sub-assemblies. It also involved such radical techniques as doing much of the wiring and piping with the locomotive platform upside down as the first assembly operation. Dick Miller and his men worked hand-in-glove with P.J. Speicher, the locomotive mechanical designer, in developing much of this. It was a great effort and it accomplished its purpose with almost no increase in facilities. And it came none too soon because we were being increasingly hounded to get our output up. It had another salubrious side: it resulted in substantial cost reductions.
And so priorities faded in, a terrible headache for manufacturers and customers alike. A customer who'd conscientiously anticipated his requirements and ordered a locomotive in what he thought was plenty of time, would have it snatched from under his nose by somebody with less forethought but a higher priority. The manufacturer felt guilty but his hands were tied; it was the law. This situation became more and more common. And as locomotives fell into short supply, so did the