Baldwin Built Over 70,000 Locomotives — Diesels Too. So Why Did GM Win?

Baldwin built more than 70,000 locomotives—and was already making diesels. Why couldn't the steam giant win the market that replaced it? At Eddystone, Pennsylvania, a 600-acre plant built for thousands of locomotives finished just 23 in 1933. Outside Chicago, General Motors was preparing a different kind of locomotive business. Follow Baldwin from custom-built steam engines to the Centipede and Sharknose, through bankruptcy, wartime production orders, and Westinghouse's purchase of a 21 percent stake. Inside the machines, we trace steam through a Mallet's cylinders and electricity from a diesel's generator to its traction motors. An Electro-Motive switcher offered in 1939 cost $750 a month for eight years. What did a railroad get for that payment, and what did keeping steam at work really cost? No. 1309, Baldwin's last conventional steam locomotive for an American railroad, carries that question from the coal fields to Cumberland, Maryland. Drawing on business histories, War Production Board records, technical accounts, and contemporary reporting on the 1911 strike, the film follows the decisions in the front office alongside the work in the boiler shop. The builders' achievements and the costs borne by shop workers and railroad crews are part of the same history; the conclusions are yours to draw. 0:00 Seventy Thousand Engines 3:34 Bankruptcy and the Diesel Bet 7:37 A Power Plant on Wheels 13:56 Did Washington Decide the Winner? 16:47 Built Like a Steam Engine 23:10 The Last American Steam Order 24:39 The Westinghouse Gamble 27:49 The Last Locomotives Selected sources Albert J. Churella — Business Strategy and Diesel Locomotive Production: ALCO versus EMD (1995) Albert J. Churella — Corporate Response to Technological Change: Dieselization and the American Locomotive Industry (1996) Dan Cupper — The Giant That Stumbled: Baldwin Locomotive Works Dominated Its Field for a Century, Then Vanished (2021) John Hepp — Locomotive Manufacturing (2016) Don Strack (compiler) — War Production Board (accessed 2026) Benjamin Coifman — The Evolution of the Diesel Locomotive in the United States (1994) Ed Moore — The Strike at Baldwin's (1911) Pennsylvania State Archives — Baldwin Locomotive Works research guide: Other Baldwin Record Holders (1997; updated 2010) Railfan & Railroad — Western Maryland 1309 slated for springtime return (2025) This documentary is not financial advice. Some scenes are illustrated with reconstructions. #Baldwin #RailroadHistory #BusinessHistory About this film: some scenes are AI-generated reconstructions, used only where no original footage or photographs exist, and they are marked on screen as reconstructions. The narration is an AI voice. The script is researched and fact-checked against the sources listed above.