GE and the Locomotive Capital of the World
Near Erie, Pennsylvania
The neighborhood east of Erie known as Lawrence Park was not always a neighborhood. General Electric built it. In nineteen ten and eleven, the company constructed the plant and then built the workers' housing around it, creating a company town that became part of the city fabric over time. At its peak, the Erie locomotive works employed more than twenty thousand people, making it one of the largest single manufacturing employers in Pennsylvania.
What Erie built here was the diesel-electric locomotive, the workhorse of American railroading for the entire second half of the twentieth century. The diesel-electric design, where a diesel engine powers generators that drive electric motors on the axles, gave railroads efficiency and reliability that steam engines could not match. GE's Erie plant refined and mass-produced that technology, and locomotive after locomotive that rolled off these assembly lines replaced the steam giants that had dominated rails for a century.
During the Second World War, the plant retooled to build war equipment and ran at extraordinary capacity. After the war, the locomotive business boomed. Erie, already a manufacturing city with deep industrial roots, became identified with this single product. The locomotive was to Erie what the automobile was to Detroit.
The decline began in the nineteen eighties and accelerated through the nineties and two thousands. GE shifted production, cut payroll, and eventually negotiated a merger with Wabtec Corporation, a rail equipment company, which completed the deal in twenty nineteen. By that point the workforce had fallen from twenty thousand to roughly seven hundred people.
The plant still operates under Wabtec, and new work, including biodiesel locomotive production, has brought employment back toward fourteen hundred. But the era when you could graduate high school in Erie and walk across town to a union job that would carry you through a career and a pension, that era is over. The plant remains. The scale of it does not.
