The GE Evolution series locomotive is a beast of a machine.
Measuring 73 feet long and weighing in at around 436,000 pounds, the Evolution drinks diesel from a 5,300-gallon tank as it chugs around the country hauling enormous loads of iron ore, grain, or whatever else needs to be moved cheaply from point A to point B.
In the U.S., the Evolution is built in two places: an old GE industrial complex in Erie, Pennsylvania, and a new manufacturing plant just outside Fort Worth, Texas. If you visit the Texas site and enter a section within the immense factory known as the platform area, you might think you’ve stumbled upon Vulcan’s workshop. The platform area is a room about the size of a football field, where the raw chassis of locomotives are fitted together and ushered toward the assembly line. The air inside is choked with smoke. The hazy atmosphere flickers crazily from the electric arcs of welders perched on the huge steel bones of unfinished engine cars. Even with earplugs, the din from the hammering and clanging, underscored by a deep rumbling tremor from machinery, is nearly deafening.
In an economy that depends upon the swift, silent transmission of information, the construction of a massive locomotive can seem like a primitive anomaly. But the smoke and clamor in the big Fort Worth plant obscures some things. For instance, at roughly 220 tons, the Evolution isn’t heavy due to some sort of technological inability to make it slimmer, in the way automobiles are now “lightweighted” for better gas mileage and efficiency. The Evolution is intentionally heavy so that its traction motors can better grip the tracks. More noteworthy is the fact that while the Evolution may look old-fashioned, it is in many respects a hurtling computer. Its array of sensors and data-collecting devices complements its bulky mass with a sleek, digital agility that will grow only more impressive and more significant with time. In this fusion of old and new, this melding of heavy and light, you can see that the Evolution resembles its maker, General Electric, a company that manufactures huge things for huge customers and yet is reinventing itself–and, in the process, the very economics of heavy industry–by embracing a new kind of sophistication.
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