Re: (rshsdepot) Erie Shops in Hornell, NY

["fred fep" <luckyshow_@_mindspring.com>]

This is a nice story but I do wonder why the transit cars are delivered by
truck and not rail, is there no longer rail connections in Hornell?
Paul
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From: <jdent1_@_optonline.net>
To: <rshsdepot_@_lists.railfan.net>
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 2:07 PM
Subject: (rshsdepot) Erie Shops in Hornell, NY


From the Buffalo News...

HORNELL - This has been a railroad town since 1851, when President Millard
Fillmore and Daniel Webster, his secretary of state, came through here on a
smoke-belching steam locomotive for the inaugural run of the Erie Railroad
from New York City to Dunkirk.
Webster sat on a rocking chair in the open rail car.

As the railroads thrived, so did Hornell. This is where the Erie built all
its repair shops on the New York-to-Chicago line. They were giant,
cavernous buildings where skilled workmen could fix up to 20 steam
locomotives at a time. More than 5,000 workers made good wages at the
shops.

And when the railroads suffered, so did Hornell. As the rails lost
passengers to the automobile and airplane, its freight business to
over-the-road truckers, Hornell's rail shops dropped to about three dozen
workers.

But like the little engine that could, Hornell stayed true to its roots,
suffering through Conrail's abandonment of the city in the mid 1970s,
fly-by-night hucksters, temporary flings and Wall Street machinations that
shut down a thriving transit car business just five years ago.

That persistence paid off. Hornell is now the North American home for a
giant French transportation company that brought the world's largest subway
contract - as much as $2.3 billion to build New York City's rail cars - to
the Hornell rail shops.

Alstom Transportation will build as many as 1,700 New York transit cars in
Hornell, a Canisteo Valley city in western Steuben County, 60 miles south
of Rochester and 90 miles southeast of Buffalo.

How did an old industrial city, a former rail town, land an industrial
giant like Alstom?

Because the city never gave up on rail, because the skilled work force
never left, because the rail shops stayed under local control.

As a result, tiny Hornell, population 9,000, today is America's biggest
rail success story.

New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is not alone in sending work
here. Rail cars bearing the logos of the nation's biggest transit systems
are parked in the Hornell yards.

Washington will spend as much as $315 million on 182 new cars; Atlanta just
awarded a $266 million contract to rebuild 238 transit cars; and the
Chicago Transit Authority, which received the last of 600 rebuilt cars from
the Hornell shops six months ahead of schedule, is about to award a
contract for 700 new rail cars.

"It looks like Alstom is the odds-on favorite to get the job," said Hornell
Mayor Shawn Hogan. "Hornell has been the workplace of choice for Chicago."

It's all been extremely gratifying to Hogan, a big, gregarious man who was
first elected in 1985 and has been mayor longer than anyone else in New
York State.

A native who returned to Hornell after school at St. Bonaventure
University, he watched as the city's once-proud Erie Train Depot slowly
started falling apart, taking down the surrounding neighborhood with it.

Now it's being restored under a $2.4 million project and will become
Alstom's North American headquarters. A restaurant has just announced it
will open across the street.

Hogan said there is now virtually no unemployment in Hornell - the city has
no separate unemployment rate, but Hogan said anyone looking for work can
find a job - and he has the pleasant task of seeking developers to build
houses for the additional workers. Alstom's subcontractors are setting up
shop, and the boom is attracting other, unrelated industry.

Alstom came to Hornell in 1997 with 50 workers, some from headquarters in
France, showing Hogan plans to hire as many as 1,000 workers within five
years.

"I've dealt with a lot of companies," Hogan said. "This is the first
company that said "this is what we're going to do' and they did it."

This year, right on schedule, Alstom hit the 1,000-employee mark.

Gregory C. Moscato, who came from Buffalo to become Alstom's vice president
for human resources, has a personnel director's dream job. He has hired 332
new workers this year alone, many of them for production jobs that pay
between $10 and $20 an hour.

"We are hiring right now. We're looking for engineers," Moscato said.

Alstom has brought manufacturing to a state that has lost thousands of
manufacturing jobs. It's thriving in a transit market that some say is
neglected by anti-rail policies set in Washington. And it willingly chose
New York State despite its reputation for high taxes.

"I would say with the success story we have, no, we don't have to
complain," Alain Percet, Alstom's vice president for rolling stock in the
United States, said in a heavy French accent, a new sound heard around
town.

The company, city officials and the union president who represents Alstom's
blue-collar workers all point to a major reason for Alstom's success: A
skilled work force that gives a day's work for a day's pay.

"I really think it's because this is a rural area," said Robert Mosko,
president of Local 2741 of the International Association of Machinists.
"Most of us worked on dairy farms; we grew up on them. One of the hardest
jobs out there is farming. That type of work ethic is here."

"In Europe, there is a tremendous amount of downtime, long vacations,"
Hogan said. "When they came over here and saw the American work ethic, they
were blown away."

The only setback Alstom had is getting enough supplies. One of the
company's major steel suppliers, Buckeye Steel in Ohio, shut down in
October, forcing Alstom to temporarily furlough 30 workers and lay off
another 80 until a new supplier is found.


Paying for shops pays off

Hornell had the rail shops to offer Alstom because of a risky decision -
some called it foolhardy - made 30 years ago by the director of Hornell's
industrial development agency.

It was 1976, and Conrail, the new freight rail company formed from six
bankrupt railroads, had announced it was closing the Hornell shops.

"We went to Philadelphia the next day and talked to them about buying the
shops," said James W. Griffin, who is still the industrial development
director.

The deal was struck. Hornell would pay Conrail $400,000 and keep the shops
in local control.

Griffin had only one problem: His agency had no money. He had a year to
raise the $400,000 and the millions more needed to make the shops ready for
a new tenant.

"At one of the public hearings, we were severely chastised by some
community leaders for not trusting Conrail," Griffin said. "History has
shown that Conrail could not care less about Hornell."

Griffin hustled together a patchwork of government grants to raise $4.4
million, bought the rail shops, refurbished them and put in new roads so
workers could get to them.

After a few false starts - a failed transit rehab venture by an obscure
veterans group, a two-year stay by General Electric - Griffin landed the
construction giant Morrison-Knudsen, which had a small rail division.

MK, as it's known here, brought the shops back to life in 1983 and kept the
skilled work force rebuilding rail cars for transit systems around the
country. At one point, it had 80 percent of the nation's contracts.

But a new chief executive officer at Morrison-Knudsen, William Agee, fresh
off his controversial tenure at Bendix, a commercial vehicle manufacturer,
nearly drove the company into the ground. A bonding company had to take
over the existing Hornell contracts in 1995.

Rather than ship the work elsewhere, the bonding company formed Amerail,
rehired the Hornell workers and finished the work, most of it for Chicago.

That left Griffin with empty plants, and he began pitching again. The
workers, he said, were always his ace in the hole.

"You can find a lot of empty buildings," he said. "You can't find a labor
force. Hornell has always been a railroad town, so we had a core of people.
They could take a locomotive apart in their sleep."

Griffin discovered that Alstom, one of the world's largest transit
companies, had no North American factories, and started pitching them hard.
Alstom, it turns out, was looking to expand into the United States.




Workers applaud Alstom

Alstom wasted no time courting its workers.

Told that Morrison-Knudsen officials were stunned when the first employees
they interviewed all had the same request for one benefit, Alstom quickly
agreed to it: Alstom workers get the first day of deer season off as a paid
holiday.

"It's far improved," union president Mosko said of Alstom's operations. "We
have a lot of the same managers we had as well as many new ones. The
philosophies are different; the technology is improved."

Alstom is trying to introduce the team concept to production, but it hasn't
happened.

"Different people have different versions," Mosko said. "We're headed
there, but we're not where we should be."

Alstom, unlike other transit car companies that make this part or that,
makes virtually the whole car in Hornell.

"One thing we have pride in as a community," Hogan said, "these cars are
designed, engineered and built here."

The New York City contract called for 25 percent of the work - the truck
bodies or undercarriages - to be done by Kawasaki, thus keeping its Yonkers
plant open.

The only thing Alstom hasn't been able to find in the United States is the
outside car body. They're made in Brazil and sent by freighter to
Baltimore.

From there, a Hornell trucking company, Silk Road Transport, hauls them to
Hornell.

"We have, to date, moved about 5,800 rail cars throughout the United
States," said Silk Road's chief executive officer, Jane Picknelly Karlsten.
"We specialize in that."

Karlsten moved her company to Hornell 20 years ago from Springfield, Mass.,
and while she hauls for other rail manufacturers as well, she said Alstom's
arrival in Hornell was a big relief.

"Alstom appears to be a quality company," she said. "It helps make us feel
good about the future."

Alstom refitted the old Erie shop for rebuilding subway cars, which is five
stories high and three football fields long with some of the world's
largest indoor cranes. The company also built a slightly smaller shop for
new cars, and uses a third building erected by the industrial development
agency for Morrison Knudsen for the undercarriages of rail cars and other
parts.

Once the finished cars go through the shop, Silk Road delivers them, a
process that requires permits through every state and every municipality
off the interstates, and two escort vehicles.

Alstom also has contracts to build locomotives for New Jersey Transit, is
redoing rail cars for New Jersey and Baltimore, and has built the
electronic equipment for the high-speed Amtrak line Acela among Boston, New
York and Washington.

Other Alstom suppliers and subcontractors are also moving to Hornell,
including a Spanish company, Talgo.

Percet, the company vice president, said Alstom has enough work right now
to keep full production going for three to five years. Hogan said that
extends to the next decade if New York and Washington pick up all the
options and the Chicago bid is won.

Percet said he doesn't see any problem if Washington is not the biggest
proponent of mass transit or rail.

"You have a railroad," he said, "you have to take care of your cars."


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The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

------------------------------