No ebook available on google books. Cheapest copy I could find was $35.

Before I spend $35 I want to know if it is worth it.

What does the book cover of the American development and its application to locomotives?

Thanks for bringing this book to my attention.

Sorry for not posting a response sooner. I guess the topic slipped from view too quick for me.

The book by Lyle Cummings is privately published by the author in 2007 through (dba) Carnot Press. Lyle Cummings has also written a biography of his father and has written about the early development of internal combustion engines and about the diesel engine since 1918.

The book has 756 numbered pages (8.5x11 inches) (includes the index) and covers:

Early submarines
Rudolf Diesel and His Contributions
Early Diesel submarines up to and through First World War by county
Then development during the 20s, 30s, and WWII of submarine diesels. Again by country.

It has various illustrations and cut-away views.

I bought my copy of the book at a truck museum in Woodland, California, and paid $55 for this 2-inch thick book and feel that the price is well worth it. [I have visited the museum since, but not seen the book there.]

Your reported price of $35 would be good.

Not to mention the societal changes of de-industrialization, movement out of the Rust Belt (first to the South and then to foreign countries), etc. When the traffic goes away, when there are no more machinery makers in New England for example, there was nothing to put in the boxcars, regardless of steam or diesel or electric power on the head end.

Howard P.

"In 1956 the U.S. machine tool industry was the world's largest, with 75,000 workers and $1.3 billion in sales. It was the biggest exporter of machine tools and had the most advanced technology, the highest level of investment per worker, and by far the highest output per worker of the world's tool industries....Japan's 1,500 manufacturers produced barely a quarter of the U.S. volume, and, to do that, needed more than half as many workers, meaning it took more than two Japanese to do the work of one American. One third of Japan's machine tools were imported, and the imported products were less expensive and of better quality than the domestic brands."

Department of Commerce,
"Comparison of the U.S. and Japan Machine Tool Industries"
June 1982
p. 10


Not too many years ago, a major U.S. importer of machine tools tried to line up a Japanese firm to build a copy of the Bridgeport, on which the patents had expired. A new Bridgeport was sent to Japan with the understanding that, if a satisfactory copy could be made at a good price, an order for 1,000 machines would be forth coming.
The Japanese company ultimately delivered two beautifully made copies, with full interchangeability of parts. But the Japanese quotation was nearly double the market price of a Bridgeport-built Bridgeport.
Quite a testimony to the DC-3 of machine tools.

American Machinist
November, 1977
p. F-9

"Though the Japanese began this process in the late 1950's, it was not until 1980 that they were ready to actually challenge American and European machine tool manufacturers on their home ground. As late as 1976, the Japanese were a negligible presence in the U.S. machine tool market, holding only 3.7 percent of it, and about the same level in Europe. But their opportunity came in the late 1970's when the worldwide demand for these products slumped as world economics headed into a prolonged recession.

While U.S. and European manufacturers were cutting production, laying off workers, and in general retrenching, Japan's machine tool makers did something unusual - and seemingly irrational - from a traditional business viewpoint. With an enormous amount of new funds supplied from some unknown outside source, they expanded their production. They turned out thousands of numerically controlled (NC) machine tool products even though they could not sell them. Akimitsu Ohko, research director of the Japanese Machine Tool Builders Association, reported that in 1981 there was an inventory of 1,000 unsold Japanese-made NC machining centers in the U.S.

At first it looked like a planning gaffe, but the Japanese had actually moved sagely. As the recession ended and demand for these machines increased, Japanese machine tools were being unloaded in America and elsewhere at discounts of up to $100,000 per machine. By the end of 1981, the targeting campaign bore fruit: Japanese makers of NC machining centers, the leading component of the machine tool market, had taken over a 50 percent share of the American market.....

By the mid-1950's MITI had already invented the off-budget subsidy, one which never shows up on government books. In the case of the machine tool industry, MITI initially found its hidden source for money in a most unlikely place – the sugar import industry. Houdaille attourney Richard D. Copaken explains this early MITI maneuver.

'MITI gave certain officially favored export industries, including machine tools, valuable licenses to import raw sugar,' Copaken says. 'This highly profitable arrangement enabled them to purchase sugar at prevailing world prices and sell it in the domestic Japanese market at prices that were artificially inflated [$40-$150 per ton higher] as a consequence of the government's sugar import quota. As MITI officials explained to me, by utilizing this price differential “the government could compensate the exporters for their deficits attributable to dumping in foreign countries.”'

But this ingenious ploy was eventually discovered by Japan's trading partners, and when they screamed, MITI was forced to look elsewhere for a secret source of dumping funds. It was discovered in a most extraordinary place, one that seems anomalous to the world of serious business. The money, enormous amounts of it, was found in gambling, specifically in the billions of yen being wagered on a modern Japanese craze, bicycle and motorcycle racing.

In any organized gambling scheme, legal or otherwise, the only sure winner is the house. MITI moved to take over that role, the same one that has built Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and Atlantic City. By promoting and expanding bicycle and motorcycle racing, and taking an exorbitant 25 percent cut of the gross, MITI siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars from the bettors. Suddenly MITI was awash in subsidy cash.

In the early 1980's, after persistent questioning by foreign newsmen who had heard rumors about the scheme, MITI admitted that some funds from bicycle races went to help subsidize their machine tool industry. But, they insisted, these funds were small – less than a half million dollars a year. And that, they said, was distributed among several types of machinery makers, not just those who made machine tools.

The potential scandal blew over: a half million dollars could do very little to prop up a billion dollar industry. During the Houdaille investigation, a MITI official was asked about these figures, but he repeated the earlier assertion. Copaken was not convinced, intuitively feeling that MITI was 'misleading him. There had to be more gambling money involved than the Japanese were admitting to. But he had no recourse; he couldn't even make reasonable inquiries. When he asked MITI to arrange a meeting with officials of the betting authorities at Japan's Bicycle Rehabilitation Association, they refused. A frustrated Copaken returned to the United States.”

Marvin J. Wolf
The Japanese Conspiracy, 1983
p. 60-67

“During a substantial portion of the eight years of the Reagan Administration, Japan's economic diplomacy was conducted with a special artfulness. It was based on the unusually close friendship that Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone developed with President Ronald Reagan – a friendship so close that it became celebrated as the “Ron-Yasu” relationship.

Time and again, Yasu asked his friend Ron for economic favors. In 1983, for instance, the American machine tool industry filed a petition with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) alleging that the Japanese were selling computer-operated machine tools in America at an unfairly low price, a practice prohibited under international trade agreements. The ITC investigated, found the Japanese guilty as charged, and recommended that the President impose stiff tariff penalties on imported Japanese machine tools.

So Yasu called Ron. He asked him to deny relief to the American machine tool makers. Ron granted Yasu's wish, thereby allowing Japanese machine tool producers to consolidate their hold on the U.S. market.

Pat Choate
Agents of Influence, 1990
p. 41-42

Albert Churella's book "Steam to Diesel.." is only peripherally concerned with the issue of Steam vs. Diesel. It is focused on why the old line steam builders (especially Baldwin) was unable to transition to becoming a diesel builder, given it's history, connections in the railroad and early experimentation with electric traction starting on the Lackawanna and Wyoming Valley (Laurel Line) in 1895.

While there are many eddies and currents in the river, Churella makes a convincing case that what is known as competence destroying innovation was at play. Because diesels were more flexible, the most effective and efficient way to make them is to limit customization and move down the "learning curve" to attain lower costs of production and retain design risks in-house. Instead, even after the late 1930's management shake-up that removed the attitudes about the innate superiority of steam (expressed repeatedly by Robert Binkerd in the 1930's), Baldwin continued to build diesels the way they built steam- small batches, extensive customization according to buyer specification-one could imagine that they thought nobody could sell locomotives without customizing them according to the railroad's design-it was the way they did business since Alexander Mitchell approached Matthias Baldwin about the "Consolidation" that was delivered in 1866.

Even a cursory review shows that while EMD had the F-units and SW's, Baldwin was tinkering with duplexes and turbines for the PRR and "double-enders" for the CNJ. It's sort of fascinating to see "centipede" advertisements referring to them as 4-8-4's and touting sinle unit horsepower ratings.

EMD had what is known as "the attacker's advantage". Baldwin had a physical plant, technological competence and physical plant all dedicated to steam, EMD never had those conversion issues.

That brings up another interesting question. In my prior post I mentioned a 1930's management shake-up. I had always assumed that Vauclain was retained as figurehead for the sake of continuity but without real executive power. When I obtained my copy of the Feb 1940 Baldwin Magazine, it made me wonder if Vauclain retained enough power to keep the company focused on steam. An obituary, glowing as it was, with a massive policy change and a "mea culpa" on the very next page couldn't have been accidental.

I have to agree. The timing is just too close to write off as random chance. I believe Mr. Vauclain was retained as chairman of the board after being replaced as president. Chairman of the board is not a figure head position, it can be quite powerful.

Steve

It's been mentioned before that Lima went through some similar management changes around the same time. William E. Woodard, the engineer behind "superpower" and many other steam innovations at Lima, died during WWII. Apparently his successor, AJ Townsend, was unable to keep Lima's focus on steam and they soon entered the diesel market as well (and Townsend resigned in disgust shortly afterward!).

For those of you with any interest in this subject, you really need to read the HF Brown paper I linked earlier in this thread. Brown was an electrical engineer who worked at the New Haven railway for many years. He had personal experience with steam, electric, and diesel power and was certainly not a "steam enthusiast". His paper (written in the late 50's) analyzes published statistical data on US railway operations during the transition to diesel-electric power. He completely acknowledges that diesel-electrics had numerous and significant advantages over steam. However, his conclusion can generally be summed up by saying that the data shows that there was no improvement in the overall profitability of US railways from their conversion to diesel-electric power, at least up until 1959.

The paper has a "question and response" section that includes a most interesting (!) debate between Mr. Brown and an EMD representative.

I think that profitability specifically linked to the type of motive power used is misleading inasmuch as the postwar era was marked by the advent of interstate highways, vastly more frequent airline services, routes etc as also improved transportation technologies in terms of competitive means to decrease traffic on the rails. The subsidies given to these competitors was substantial while the roads had a lot of underutilised infrastructure that also ate away at profitability due to to their being maintained by what profits existed.