I can’t say that I have ever seen a detailed treatment of the Alco-GE arrangement and its eventual termination. One might expect it to have been covered in a trade journal such as “Railway Age”, but perhaps even there it would have been more in the nature of transcribed corporate press releases than searching editorial comment.
The best coverage of the ending of the agreement that I have found is in Steinbrenner, page 317, under the heading “GE’s Fateful Decision”.
In summary, there were mutual technical frustrations between the two partners. (Presumably GE wasn’t happy with Alco’s engine and Alco wasn’t happy with GE’s turbocharger.) Then GE saw itself as having a diminishing market share in a diminishing market, already dominated by EMD, with no real expectation that Alco would put the resources into developing a locomotive and diesel engine that would allow market share growth.
Steinbrenner had noted (page 313) that n 1950 GE had assumed responsibility for field sales and service for Alco-GE locomotives. But GE staff would then have been on the point when it came to customer complaints, and that may have helped convince it that the Alco-GE locomotive was too much of a troubled product, and one that did not justify the effort that would be required for its redemption.
On that page is a copy of an internal Alco letter that in effect says that having GE, with its large network of nationwide office, assume these responsibilities was better than Alco’s attempting to build its own network. (Perhaps that was an example of Alco’s apparent parsimony when it came to development spending.)
Anyway, it was GE who wanted out, on the basis that it thought that it could do better alone.
As to what the agreement allowed and did not allow the participants to do is hard to discern.
Evidently GE could still act independently when it came to industrial locomotives. But these may not have been excluded from coming under the Alco-GE heading when that was appropriate. I think for example that the 70-tonner was offered both as a GE product and an Alco-GE product before the split.
GE’s domestic electric locomotive production during the Alco-GE era was I think under the GE name, not Alco-GE. But the GTEL-4500 prototype was an Alco-GE, even though built at Erie.
In the international arena, Internal General Electric (IGE) appears to have acted independently, with its export locomotives carrying a GE, not an Alco-GE label. Quite a few of these had Alco 12-244 engines, but these were usually described as Alco-engined GEs, not Alco-GEs, implying that Alco was simply a supplier, not a partner in these cases.
Nonetheless, the 1950 Alco internal letter mentioned a few paragraphs back included the sentence: “For nearly a year, as you know, we have worked together on diesel-electric sales in the international field through International General Electric Company.”
I am not quite sure how to interpret that. Possibly it meant simply that Alco had benefitted from being the engine supplier to IGE in some cases. But one may identify cases that might have included joint sales and/or support efforts. AFE Uruguay bought a batch of the Alco-GE RS3 model at about the same time as it bought its first batch of IGE Alco 12-244-engined shovelnoses. And EFCB Brasil bought a broad-gauge Alco-GE RS3 fleet at about the same time as a fleet of metre-gauge IGE Alco 12-244-engined 110-ton road-switchers. The Alco DL-500 “World” locomotive was announced just before the split and was originally billed as an “Alco-GE” production. Whether GE had much input to its design beyond the electrical equipment is unknown. But it was sized more for SB-gauge roads, whereas the IGE basic designs had been sized to fit CMT-gauge roads (as well as SB), which philosophy GE carried over to the export Universals, and against which GE precept the DL-500 would have been an outlier,
That not much information seems to be available on the Alco-GE partnership and the eventual split suggest that both organizations controlled fairly tightly what was released, with each putting its own “positive spin” on the split.
Cheers,
