According to several sources, demolition of the Alco plant has begun.

NH0401

I am presuming ALCO had a number of buildings. Which was this and is it the last?

Steve

They have been talking about this on a Urban exploration forum here is the link http://www.uer.ca/forum_showthread.asp? ... adid=85818

It is interesting to see that portions of the ALCO plant have remained standing about ten years later than the original EMD Plant One in La Grange did. A lot of history was "made" in those buildings, and a lot of money was made for the local community and the national economy, while providing good jobs and paying taxes. It is the businesses like those that "add value" in the production of their products that are the economic engines of a growing economy, and sadly that is the segment of US business that is now in rapid decline. You cannot pull yourself out of an economic depression very effectively on the profit margins and job growth provided by selling each other stuff manufactured in China.

I would hope that some of our museums are able emphasize the importance of manufacturing to the US economy and our standard of living, since our media and politicians seem to be almost completely oblivious to it.

PC

Heres a photo of better times:

this is a little off topic, but i am hoping one of you out there can help

I have been trying to reproduce a black and white of the errection floor of the alco works, does anyone have a slide or photo that they can scan HIGH RES .TIFF for a 11x14 print to be reproduced, I am not selling this it is for personal use only in my N scale hobby and artificats room,

it can be late steam or early diesels, these type of buildings always have me fasinated and would love to have one

any help would be incredibly grateful

To Mr. Cook-your comments are spot-on, and resonate with me for several reasons. First are the economical-which you elucidated perfectly-reasons. Next are the sociological reasons (not everyone in society is meant to be a cubicle dweller or a Wal-Mart greeter).

But the strongest response I feel to this topic-and to the pictures in the link, which are haunting-is a sense of loss...the loss of America's industrial greatness, the sense of America's standing in the world. When I think of the Alco, Baldwin, and Lima factories (along with Packard, etc)-what they once were, vs. what they are now-then I start to think about the jobs shipped overseas, the communities decimated by factory closings, and the growing dependence we have on others to make things we use.

Oh, I'm sure that this may be more emotion-based than fact-based (or is it?!), but there has to be some truth behind the emotion. Seems to me that somehow, some way there must be an economic model that would preserve the America I see or sense as threatened.

All the more reason to preserve, re-use, and not tear down (keeping on topic here, I hope).

John, thanks for your comment. Unfortunately the dire economic situation facing the US is very much fact based and thanks to the internet you do not have to drive past the wrecked and graffiti covered factories in many areas of the country to be able to see what is happening. There is plenty of evidence posted online. Unfortunately, to find it you generally have to look outside the US news media:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... t-WW2.html

What does this have to do with preservation? This is history in the making, and somebody is going to need to tell the story to future generations.

PC

Oh yes, the economy being a disaster is fact-based, no two ways about it. What I was refering to (fact vs. emotion) was whether American manufacturing "had" to be in permanent decline, "had" to go overseas...or is there an economic model that could in part turn around the decline of American manufacturing (outside of the current recession)?

I may be wandering from preservation on that subject just a tad, but if the entire country goes to a cubicle-and-WalMart model, there will be more to preserve than funds to do said preservation.

The frequently used description that the US going through a transition to a service based economy overlooks the critical role of "value added" manufacturing activities and the wealth they bring into the economy. This "transition" is more of a long gradual decline. I could go through a lengthy discussion of the demise of industrial America and probably get many folks on RYPN upset with me, but suffice to say that the decline is far more widespread than railroad equipment manufacturing although that is the aspect that we usually see and recognize. Over the years I dealt with many heavy manufacturing operations from a standpoint of the support of their locomotive fleets, and nowadays not only are the locomotives not there any more but their railroad service is gone, the factories and businesses are gone, and in many cases the buildings are now demolished too. The list of these industries that used rail service and maintained locomotives included railroad equipment builders, foundries, automobile manufacturing, steel mills, steel structure fabrication companies, shipyards, and many others. In each case they employed thousands of people, all of those jobs now being gone as well as many of the industrial supply industry jobs that provided supporting services to these large operations. You just can't make up for the loss of cash flow and the prosperity generated by those kind of massive manufacturing plants with the profit margin from selling each other goods imported from China.

This is one of the reasons that in "interpreting" the role of the railroads in American society it is helpful to take a wider perspective and look at what was simultaneously happening in manufacturing and other industries in the periods of time being discussed. There is so much to study, but sadly it seems that we often do not learn from it.

What is happening around us to American industry right now is going to be viewed eventually as one of the most significant times in US history. It is redefining our future.

PC

One thing that deserves mention is the fact that The Alco Historical & Technical Society has tried to "save" at least three buildings for transformation into a ALCO Museum without success. In fact, we had a deal to purchase a building but the plant was sold out from under us to a developer to build condos instead!

Schenectady City fathers have no interest in preserving history and as a result the AHTS has received no help from the City in its attempt to create a Museum.

I also publish a Newsletter called ALCO NOTES which will soon feature a 3-4 part series on the ALCO Plant.It will have photos of the buildings as well as a description of what ALCO used them for. This will cover the series of building that are getting torn down as we speak. If anyone wants a PDF copy, contact me off list.

John Mech
Past President AHTS

I think the economic malaise facing the western world can be explained in two words: "free trade". Get rid of tarriffs and the Chinese, in particular, rub their hands together with glee.
Australia's economy is largely propped up by coal and iron ore exports to China and our manufacturing capacity has been disappearing at a great rate of knots for some years. Mind you, we all like to buy all those cheap electronic gadgets made in you-know-where....
We have a fairly healthy loco building industry here, mainly American designs built under licence, but recently, one operator who had bought locally made locos placed an order with a Chinese manufacturer. Could be the beginning of the end!
Cheers, Bob

I think it is unfortunate that among the locomotive builders, some of whom employed over 10,000 people in their best years, relatively little importance was assigned to preserving examples of anything from their production. As I have mentioned before, I have an EMD staff announcement from 1947 (their 25th anniversary) indicating that one of the items on the agenda for the sales meeting would be a discussion of setting up a company museum. Obviously that did not happen, and looking back at the many cutaways and display items they produced for trade shows it is really a shame that almost all these specialty items, many of which ended up in a "second life" being used for training, went either directly to scrap or were given to customers who in turn sent them to scrap. The cost of producing some of these specialty display items was tremendous, and the return from their scrap value was usually negligible. Handing them over to a museum would have been a nice gesture by management to acknowledge the contribution of the company and the employees to history, but it most cases it just was not a matter of concern.

PC

I think it's a real shame that this plant is being torn down. I would have never even heard of Schenectady if it weren't for ALCO. I wonder if anything more noteworthy has ever happened there? It seems to me if anything of an historic nature might have been saved in that city it would have been ALCO's plant.

I have been searching on Bing Maps to look for this site. All I find is a cleared area that looks like where ALCO may have been. Can anyone point me to the "address" for this site?

Actually, General Electric also still calls Schenectady home. But, unlike ALCO, they do have two of the products that made them what they are stuffed and mounted on the grounds of the headquarters -- a vertical steam turbine, and one of the first utility gas turbines.

http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/ge/

http://files.asme.org/ASMEORG/Communiti ... s/5527.pdf

http://files.asme.org/ASMEORG/Communiti ... s/5501.pdf