jsmatlak where did you find that.

Air brake written material of any kind is super rare outside of railroaders collections.

I found it at the big Toy Train meet in Pasadena. Someone had a classroom manual from an EMD locomotive training course on their table with lots of loose pages inside, the page with the poem was one of them.

That fable that Robert mentions seems to have been quite widely distributed in the 1940s, I also have some EMD training center documents from that time period that include copies of the fable.

Two of the men whose names were omitted from paragraph two are Sloan and Kettering. They may sound familiar.

I once asked at a museum why they were not mentioned in a display on the transition from steam to Diesel and was told it was because they were not railroaders. I could not see why that should disqualify them from being acknowledged as participants in the making of railroad history.

Sloan and Kettering were the primary commercial decision makers at GM who facilitated the acquisition and growth of Electro-Motive and GM's involvement with Diesel power and thus were two principal architects of the retirement of about 60,000 steam locomotives from the US railroads.

PC

Another example of an overlooked US designer: James G. Blunt of the American Locomotive Company, best known for his diesel switcher truck, but the designer of many innovative components used on steam and diesel locomotives.