New locomotive plant in Fort Worth, Texas

GoErie.com wrote:Lawrence Park Township will remain the home of GE Transportation locomotives. But it won't be the only home.

The company, an Erie mainstay for more than a century, announced Thursday that it plans to build a new $96 million locomotive plant in Fort Worth, Texas.

About $4.3 million in tax incentives and the promise of a lower pay scale may have been two attractions for GE, which has about 4,500 employees in Lawrence Park and another 800 at its engine plant in Grove City.

The company said it expects to hire about 500 people for its new plant.

Read more at: http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art ... ewssitemap

Fort Worth Star Telegram wrote:Thursday's announcement of a new locomotive plant in Texas displays the company's faith in U.S. manufacturing, particularly after the train unit's CEO, Lorenzo Simonelli, disclosed that a Mexican site had been considered.

The Fort Worth choice saves Immelt from the potential embarrassment of having the facility go south of the border while he serves as chairman of President Barack Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Read more at: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/05/12 ... sites.html

Is this the second alternative to what GE wanted to put in Lynn, MA? Or is this something different?

Yes. Per the articles above, they were looking at Lynn, Texas, and Mexico.

The whole scheme seems parallel to EMD's Cleveland plant of the 1949-1953 period: new plant for overflow locomotive production in a boom era. (Closed down when the boom was over. Obvously GE thinks locomotive-building good times will last long enough to justify the investment in the new plant. The profit margin on locomotives is doubtless a closely held secret, but the $96 million I've seen mentioned for investment in the Ft Worth plant will probably be covered in the first year or two.)

Dallas Business Journal wrote:The Fort Worth City Council is scheduled to vote Tuesday on tax abatement agreement worth up to $3.3 million for GE Transportation’s planned locomotive factory in north Fort Worth.

Read more at: http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/ ... ntive.html

One of the conditions the city council is putting on it's sweetener offer (thanks for posting the link, MEC407!) is that GE must
"Create a minimum of 400 full-time jobs by the end of 2012 and 775 by the end of 2016. Of those, 30 percent must be Fort Worth residents and 10 percent must be from the central city."

Earlier announcements said that GE would hire 500 for the new plant. (Hmm. "Create." Is there some way GE could get credit for a new job in, say, a restaurant across the street without doing the hiring itself?)

From Railway Age:

Railway Age wrote:[GE] plan[s] to invest approximately $200 million in a new, state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Fort Worth, Tex., as well as significant technology upgrades at our more than 100-year old manufacturing facility in Erie, Pa., to meet accelerating domestic and global demand.

The Texas facility will manufacture, assemble, and remanufacture GE’s rail and transportation-related products. Production is scheduled to start by the third quarter of 2012. GE Transportation’s new manufacturing site in the U.S. will complement its existing manufacturing operations in North America. It will create more than 500 new high-tech manufacturing jobs in Texas by 2012 with the potential of up to 275 additional jobs in subsequent years. Since the beginning of 2011, GE Transportation has announced and created more than 1,900 new U.S. jobs, including nearly 1,000 at its Erie site.

Read more at: http://www.railwayage.com/breaking-news ... -3520.html

From the Star-Telegram:

Star-Telegram wrote:The Fort Worth City Council will consider expanding the scope of a tax abatement agreement with GE Transportation to cover a second manufacturing plant the company now plans west of Texas Motor Speedway.

GE has already received an 85 percent abatement on the expansion of a 670,000-square-foot distribution center to 900,000 square feet for a locomotive manufacturing plant off Farm Road 156 and Three Wide Drive. GE said it is spending $60 million to develop that plant.

Recently, the company announced that it wants to build a 236,000-square-foot mining equipment plant nearby. That project will cost about $50 million.

Read more at: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/11/02 ... nding.html

From GoErie.com:

GoErie.com wrote:Three Wide Drive, an industrial property off Interstate 114 that still crackles from last summer's drought, is a long way from the century-old, tree-lined drives and brick buildings of GE Transportation's headquarters in Lawrence Park Township.

The half-million-square-foot, gray-and-white stucco building, built as a distribution center with no particular tenant in mind, is still mostly a shell that's being transformed a little each day by teams of construction workers.

But this Texas address, next door to weekend crowds of 140,000 at Texas Motor Speedway, is bound by common purpose to its Erie counterpart 1,400 miles away.

Before the end of the year, about 500 employees here in north Fort Worth, most of them yet to be hired, will be doing work that mirrors the efforts of their 5,500 counterparts in Erie.

Story and video at: http://www.goerie.com/article/20120129/ ... ar%27s-end

From GoErie.com:

GoErie.com wrote:GE Transportation intends for the locomotives and mining equipment made in Fort Worth, Texas, to be identical to those made in Lawrence Park Township.

But employee paychecks won't be.
...
Roger Zaczyk, president of the union local, said he's learned from unions in Texas that applicants for GE Transportation jobs in Fort Worth have reported hourly wages that range from $16 to $22 an hour.

That's substantially lower than the union wage scale in Lawrence Park, where entry-level forklift drivers collect $26.50 an hour and some of the plant's most skilled workers can earn up to $36.49 an hour.

Stephan Koller, spokesman for GE Transportation, said the report of a $16 starting wage in Texas wasn't exactly correct. He declined, however, to discuss the wage schedule in more detail.

Read more at: http://www.goerie.com/article/20120625/ ... -make-less

From the Star-Telegram:

Star-Telegram wrote: Teamwork is high among the requirements for job candidates at two factories General Electric is opening in north Fort Worth.

GE Manufacturing Solutions, a division of GE Transportation, has already hired about 30 production workers locally to begin learning how to assemble electric drive systems for mining vehicles in the first of the GE plants to open just west of Texas Motor Speedway.

The larger railroad locomotive operation is set to open this year, but the company is building a database of job applicants and will begin hiring for those positions within four to six weeks.

Read more at: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/07/29 ... -high.html

From the Star-Telegram:

Star-Telegram wrote:General Electric plans to begin producing locomotives at its new north Fort Worth plant in January, the company's top local executive said Friday.

And GE is still looking to hire manufacturing workers.

"We should begin cutting metal, bending metal, at the beginning of January," Walter Amaya, project leader for GE Manufacturing Solutions, said at the annual Heart of North Texas Business Conference in Hurst.

"We hope the first new locomotive will roll out of the plant by Jan. 31."

Read more at: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/11/02 ... otive.html

What does this mean for the Erie plant. I wonder what direction the Erie plant is going?

I don't think it means anything per se. GE just spent a lot of money on upgrades at the plants in Erie and Grove City, and they spent that money after the Fort Worth plant was announced.

Ira wrote:What does this mean for the Erie plant. I wonder what direction the Erie plant is going?

Monday, it is believed that GE will file the WARN act in preparation for a layoff. A number has not been released yet, that information expected to be released Monday as well