94 employees will lose their jobs and, presumably, the old headquarters on Air Brake Avenue shuttered. On the positive side, WABTEC stock is +0.25%.

https://www.post-gazette.com/business/p ... 2312220098

just another example of a thing called agenda. Who and why is the question you need to answer. If you say a political party you are wrong.

Curious that the employees being terminated won't have 'BUMPING' rights to other positions in the WABTEC world.

In other words, it's capitalism.

Strictly business.

the famous "growth through acquisition" has increased long term debt.They are reacting to the need to "improve" the bottom line using the time honored slash and burn strategy.

I am not surprised they are closing this plant. It was a very old facility in a very restricted location. It sounds like most of the manufacturing had already moved to other locations. Locomotive, transit, and the rubber plant had moved out years ago. Forging came from Union Switch up the river a couple of miles. I believe aluminum castings came from NYAB in Watertown. The one thing that might have been keeping them in there was the 150 car test rack. I would be interested to know where the big test rack and engineering have moved to.

This could hurt railway preservation as the antique items were still made there. They may not move the tooling, old machines, and skilled people who still knew how to make these old products to a new location. The intricate castings were made at Wilmerding in a foundary that may not have an equal in the US.

A large portion of the production was moved to the Stony Creek plant in Ontario Canada back in the late 1970's early 1980's. This is a much more modern facility compared to Wilmerding. I'm very familiar with the latter, as my maternal grandfather, and my father worked there.My grandfather retired from there, while my father was transferred to Stony Creek, where he retired.He had begun his career there fresh out of the Penn State school of Engineering in the early 1950's.

I worked for Jamestown Malleable Iron division of Blackstone between 1983 and 1992. Classic old-school sand casting foundry with intricate internal cores, I was the IT guy but still spent a lot of time out on the floor and learned the business.
I was astounded at the time not only how many castings we were making for Westinghouse for recognizeable air brake parts (I knew what they were even before I got into the industry), but the big 'pattern room' that was about two stories high and was floor to ceiling in wood patterns - unbelievably intricate woodworking in hardwoods mounted on hardwood backboards. True artwork.
What got me was that I learned cast air brake parts that way, particularly air reservoirs and the triple valves. We had a terrible problem with inventory control until I realized that it was SOP that if a triple valve failed a pressure test after cleaning, they'd put them in a cage bin and set them outside to rust up for a few months, then bring them back in, polish them up, and pressure test them again. Any internal pinholes would have rusted solid. But you can imagine the havoc that did in an inventory and WIP control system; we had to develop a 'rust and retest' operation to fix it. Yeah, suddenly you're missing 500 triple valves and they don't show up until next year when they are sold with no WIP inventory after you already wrote them off as scrap loss!
About 1989 the Chinese competition was getting awful, we weren't making any money, and they closed the foundry. A year later they knocked down the pattern building. I witnessed those patterns going out the door and being loaded into pickups for firewood for home heating. Couldn't believe it. If you ever wondered what happened to the original air brake patterns for K brakes, I saw them go out the door. I have no idea how the Chinese did it for the current prodution stuff, but the historic stuff died way back then.
If you ever see "JMID" on a brake casting, that's Jamestown Malleable Iron Division.

Casting is a dying art. Metallic 3-D printing is at the point now where it will be a more cost effective way to make things with internal (cored) passageways. I've also seen manifolds being made by CNC machining solid blocks of metal in layers and then using some kind of super epoxy to unify it into one assembly.

Kind of a related question: who can manufacture bronze piston rings? Even 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!

I've called a few places that make custom rings, mostly for engines and air compressors. They can make a bronze ring with a simple scarf joint, but it is going to be concentric and straight.

Jeff, you might want to check with Gord McOuat on the rings. He showed me some TTC rings that I think were home made. They were of a completely different design. As I recall they were three separate pieces. Two outer rings and a middle filler piece. I think the ring he showed me was for an E relay valve. They used a unique diameter ring that has been hard to get for a long time.

It has always amazed me the Wall Street rewards managements for closing facilities which to my mind is an acknowledgement that the management is incompetent as to the reality that it CANNOT wring profitability out of the facility they are closing and the work force they are axing. If you cannot make a facility profitable you should not be rewarded for closing it - management should be fired for its incompetence.

Now, I'll preface this by acknowledging that I don't know the specifics of WABCO/Wabtec's finances, nor do I know any more about their Wilmerding facility than I have seen in photos and news reports.

But in your universe, you would insist that railroad management should have been fired for failing to "wring profitability" out of the use of steam locomotives and switching to diesels instead.......

I myself have a love of old foundry work, casting, molten metal, patterns, smithing, and the like--but only in a museum/historic preservation/craftsman setting, not daily work. Similarly, I remain in awe of deep shaft mining and coal harvesting, but I certainly wouldn't wish the old mining life of risky environments, black lung disease, etc. on people of the 21st century, even in China or India. (As one example, I saw the numbers on coal mine production feeding a specific power plant in Pennsylvania. In 1949 it took mines using 1,270 miners to produce coal for the power plant from six different mines; at the end when coal use was ended, it was fed by a single mine employing "less than ten" employees........)

If Wabtec can meet its needs and improve quality control in a modern plant with 3-D "printing" robots rather than a century-old building with sand casting, it has a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders to do so, not to nostalgic preservationists.

“This actually isn’t new news,” Wabtec told Railway Age on Dec. 27. “Wabtec negotiated the Wilmerding plant closure back in 2022 as part of the contract agreement with the union [United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America Local 610]. The Wilmerding site’s deteriorating condition made it too expensive to maintain. The site also was substantially underutilized and operated at less than a third of its capacity. The plant’s outdated layout did not lend itself to modern production processes and material flows.

The city I used to reside in had a number of elderly factory/mill buildings that were falling on hard times and supposedly past saving. No industries wanted to invest in them. Lo and behold, a local political fixer somehow picked them up and proceeded to turn them into upscale apartments and lofts. It was interesting to watch how quickly the term "structurally unsafe" was dropped and "fundamentally sound" substituted.

Wilmerding must not be likely to be gentrified in the foreseeable future.

With the decline of the Monroeville (as well as most other) shopping malls, not a lot of force for gentrification there as opposed to areas closer to dahntahn. Prices are rising in most parts of the greater Pittsburgh area so it might eventually occur there, but that whole stretch of the Mon valley is pretty depressed. I stay with my cousin in Clairton when I visit there and compared to life there in the 1960's, a lot different. Still to be reckoned with is the effect of the recent US Steel buyout. The coke plant in Clairton is down to (I think) 2 working batteries now........