Montreal Locomotive Works - MLW-Worthington

MLW-Worthington

MLW's parent, ALCO, experienced several years of declining business during the 1960s following the entry of former-partner General Electric into the road switcher manufacturing business in the United States. This was due, in part, to continuing reliance on GE's high quality electrical transmissions, sold to ALCO and MLW at a disadvantageous price by GE. Placed in a similar situation when Westinghouse left the railway rotating equipment market in 1953, Fairbanks-Morse developed its own line of rotating equipment, although this did not save F-M's railway business. GMD's transmissions were built to parent GM-EMD's designs, in turn closely based on earlier GE equipment (prior to 1937). ALCO found itself in financial difficulty in 1964 and was purchased by Worthington Corporation, a major manufacturer of equipment for the pulp and paper industry and a former builder of steam locomotive accessories. At that time MLW was renamed MLW-Worthington and continued much as before.

In 1967, Worthington Corporation merged with the Studebaker Corporation, recently exited from the auto business, to form Studebaker Worthington Inc., with ALCO as a wholly owned subsidiary. In 1968, several divisions of ALCO became semi-independent subsidiaries, and in a 1969 corporate reorganization, Studebaker Worthington closed the Schenectady locomotive manufacturing facility. The locomotive designs were transferred in 1969 to MLW-Worthington and the diesel engine designs were sold in 1970 to White Motor Corporation. The ALCO diesel engine designs went through several changes in ownership as White Motor Corporation formed White Industrial Power which was subsequently purchased by the (British) General Electric Company (GEC) in 1977. Renamed Alco Power Incorporated by GEC, ironically, the designs were sold to Fairbanks-Morse in 1994.

In this period, MLW-Worthington partnered with Pratt & Whitney Canada to construct the Turbo Train fleet for Canadian National. It also continued engineering development of the 251-series ALCO engine, producing the M640 4000 hp 18-cylinder prototype for Canadian Pacific in 1972. However, by this time CP had settled on the GMD 645-series SD40 and SD40-2 as their standard locomotive, and there were no further orders forthcoming from that company.

Throughout the early 1970s MLW-Worthington continued to build second generation designs for Canadian railways. The CLC (renamed as Fairbanks-Morse, Canada) had closed in 1969, leaving MLW-Worthington as the primary competitor to the rapidly expanding GMD. During this time, at the behest of Canadian National, MLW-Worthington developed the wide-nosed "safety cab", which provided improved crew accommodation and collision protection. First appearing on the M-420 and concurrently on the GMD GP38-2, the safety cab became common on Canadian National and the British Columbia Railway. Canadian Pacific, however, never purchased any such units from MLW. This form of cab design has now become a North American industry standard. Although earlier wide-nosed cab designs on models such as the EMD FP45 and DDA40X bear a superficial resemblance, they lack the advances in collision protection and accommodations of the "safety cab" design.