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The other GE group was the Washington Office of the International General Electric Company. The principal objective of these people was export sales in which they dealt with the representatives of foreign customers located in Washington. However, they also had extensive contacts with the many important embassies in Washington as well as the State Department and other agencies involved with foreign trade. in some cases they were doing business with foreign governments through embassy contacts direct. The IGE people were a special breed with special backgrounds to fit them for much of this work. That constitutes the GE groups we'd have to deal with. When turning to the government, the list of agencies is so vast that to avoid confusion it may be best to say merely that our major contact would be the War Production Board and we'll deal with the rest of the agencies as we go along. For example, a locomotive on order by the Army might in itself be sponsored by several different branches and the problem could be to find out which: Ordinance, Quartermaster Corps, Engineer Corps and so on. The same was true of locomotives for the Navy. This was the broad general picture that Frank Headley and I had facing us as we arrived in Washington that day to begin the job of legitimizing the several hundred locomotives on order at Erie.
The Puddlejumper was an Erie to Philadelphia train so the Washington sleeper was detached at Harrisburg to be picked up by a liner out of the west which carried it on into the capital via York and Baltimore. When I arrived in Washington that morning, spring was in the air and it felt good after Erie's still-icy blasts off the refrigerated lake.  The big, beautiful, black, shiny GG1 electric locomotive, some of which we'd built at Erie, delivered us into the capital;s magnificent Union Station, by that time a familiar spot to me.  I went out to the huge, gray-stone portico from which you could look across the park to the Capital, got a cab and headed for the Carlton.  The Carlton was relatively small but one of the finest hotels in Washington as well as the U.S.A.  It was popular with notables and you could sit in the Carlton lobby for a few minutes at almost any time of the day or evening and see familiar figures in polotics, business, the arts, nearly any field.  So ti was an interesting and satisfactory place to stay and it happened to be the "GE hotel" in Washington, the Company keeping two small suites there on a permanent basis just for emergencies.  I don't remember its address but it was located only about a block from the White House grounds and on a corner with no other buildings up against it so you had an airy feeling in it regardless of where your room was.  And of course the food, drink, service and housekeeping were superb. [[red pencil close parenthesis mark]]  The hotel was maybe eight stories made pf a buff-colored brick, and stood back from the sidewalk with small patches of lawn and garden here and there, very neat and attractive.  The main entrance