I remember when my father took me to work on a Saturday morning when he was in the Testing dept. I would have been in elementary school. He took me into the room where the 150 car test rack was. He stopped in front of the board where the brake valves and gauges were. He instructed me to move the handle on the large valve all the way over. Between the exhaust at the automatic valve and the brake sets on the racks, it left a definite impression on me.....

What I remembered about the 150 car test rack was that the four locomotives were on a stand at the front, but the train went down a long hallway, then at car 75 it reversed and came back up a second hallway. That way car 1 and car 150 were both by the locomotive equipment. Each brake cylinder had a flag on the piston so you could see the brake action from the locomotive platform. When the brakes were put in to emergency the time between car 1 and car 150 getting brake cylinder action was only a few seconds, even though there was over a mile of pipe between them.

I was about seven or eight, it would be the early 1960's. I remember the racks stretching out it seemed everywhere. Other than the occasional open house that was the last time I was in the plant.

The other thing to note here is that despite the reputation, Pittsburgh as a whole has undergone quite the transformation. If you look at the properties in the river valley that 'used to be' steel-centric and demolished, they have largely been successfully redeveloped into multiunit housing and commercial areas. So an obsolete factory area, after it is finally cleaned up, is actually hot property.

Because of the banking, medical, and technology industries in the region, Pittsburgh has done as well as anyplace in the east on reinventing itself. It's still a strong industrial presence but you don't see a whole lot of undeveloped brownfield areas as a result of deindustrialization.

No place states this better than the strip district. What was the massive PRR fruit and food distribution center on the east bank of the Allegheny is an absolutely thriving commercial area now, keeping much of the PRR building intact. 10 years ago there was still a lot of vacant land used for parking on the south end, no more, it's all housing development now. And trying to find a place to park on a weekend evening is next to impossible down there, place is packed.

My son is moving back from North Carolina, and was a little stunned on real estate prices around the city. Again, not the deal it was 10 years ago. The housing quality is all over the map, and few places have the bizarre street layout it has, but Pittsburgh as a whole is not your typical 'rust belt' story.

Ride the light rail dahntahn and walk the strip district. Pittsburgh's topography is like San Francisco's but moreso - hills and valleys such that you can't drive a half mile away without taking a 4 mile trip to where the creek cut through between adjacent valleys. Most of the city is built over coal mines so there's a state subsidized insurance program against subsiding in order to keep the housing market healthy. Check out Rivers of Steel for industrial preservation and revitalization in the rustiest part of the Mon valley..... but it hasn't spread east enough to Wilmerding yet to make it a likely conversion.

> the scarf joint type rings require a ton of specialized tooling: their ID and their OD are not concentric, and then are not perfectly rectangular in section (they have a little radial draft). Then the half-lap joint type, I can't even begin to figure out how those were made!

As described to me by a former WABCo employee, the rings are machined from tubes specially cast with this offset (not sure of the alloy). Then they are machined so that the ring is thinner where the offset sticks into the interior of the ring, while the surfaces of the ring which contact the sides of the piston groove is thicker. This tapering structure and two thickness structure ensures that the ring presses uniformly around the bushing's interior surface and compensates for slight variations between ring and bushing concentricity.

The half-lap joints were made using a special milling machine which, when I saw it 25 years ago (and still in use), was old enough to have a leather flat belt drive. It had two cutters, one above the other, offset vertically. The ring to be machined was placed and clamped in a fixture, which was then manually raised against the cutters to machine both lands at the same time (and separate the ends of the lap joint). This ensured that the diagonal surfaces of the half-lap joint always made a good seal.

Smaller rings for things like J electric compressor governor double pistons were concentric inside and out and used a single tapered joint oriented diagonally across the ring's sealing surface without the half lap feature. Whether a half lap or single lap was used also depended on how tight a seal was desired for the apparatus in question.

This is a good piece on the closing of the plant by Salena Zito, who writes about the decline in manufacturing jobs in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opin ... ufacturing

Salena Zito does seem to get the two companies, Westinghouse Electric, East Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse Air Brake, Wilmerding, mixed up through out the article. George was a Mechanical Engineer, not an electrical engineer. He was the first President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Same old crying about the good old days. Why don't we make steam locomotives anymore? How about player pianos? What happened to buggy whips?

All modern nations can produce more using fewer people today than 40 years ago. It's called productivity. It is also true with farming. It's also true in office work. When is the last time you saw a secretary take dictation?

I saw last year a Danish travel show where the hosts visited a Norwegian frozen pizza factory. The entire factory is automated and there are no line employees. The only employee visible in the tour was the plant manager guiding the travel hosts. Frozen pizzas are created on an automated assembly line monitored by artificial intelligence cameras and computers, down to how many pieces of pepperoni are on each pie. No hands touch the pizzas.

I have personally toured a grocery chain warehouse in Denmark that is entirely automated. Computers call automated shelf pickers and robotic arms pack pallets which then move by conveyor to waiting straight trucks for delivery routes.

Modern dynamic braked locomotives mean train handling with less air brake use. Less air brake use means less wear. Less wear means less demand for parts. Less parts means less demand at the factory. Yes, those employees need to find new careers.

In Europe, we have six week vacations and massive family benefits. How do we pay for that? Productivity. I am visiting in the USA today and I am stunned by the number of employees who just stand around in the lobby to greet people. I am having the buffet breakfast, but there is a full service staff to bring me coffee (and the bill). It's a buffet! I can get my own coffee.

Unfortunately the Pittsburgh downtown is suffering. In the next 4 years it will have lost the master lease holders for at least 2 of the skyscrapers. BNY (who I work for) is only keeping the service center and making it a regional hub, Citizens is vacating their current building and moving into another. Other companies are moving outside of the city proper. Granted these things were probably going to happen eventually; but the pandemic only sealed the deal and sped up the timeline.

Just to show that Wabtec/WABCO and Wilmerding are not outliers in this era, situation, and technology, this surfaced in a totally unrelated news search I did earlier today:

A related rail casting firm in Carlisle, Pa. (near Harrisburg) shut down in July:

https://cumberlink.com/news/local/busin ... 64793.html



Link to another article for "year's top news":
https://www.dailyitem.com/wire/state/se ... 208ef.html



History of the foundry going back to 1840:
https://cumberlink.com/news/local/frog- ... 704fd.html

County Historical Society gets the donation of related history/assets:
https://cumberlink.com/news/local/cumbe ... 665e2.html

(Note: Paywalls in effect, pick and choose what you want to read most as the last one you'll probably get blocked.....)

Oddly, it seems the railroad tracks serving the plant directly have been gone for many years now.......

Given the cost of purchasing residential conversions within the triangle, I wouldn't be surprised to see some succeed in no longer required commercial space. Also, there's a drive to increasing presence in "the office" even for hybrid job workers who work mostly from home. In my current area, we're converting space in my data center to housing call center cubicles (people are a nuisance relative to servers from the engineers perspective. They have irrational demands other than being fed power and kept cool) and the 1950's mini skyscraper anchoring my neighborhood now has office space on the ground, condos in the middle, and a restaurant on top.