History
When the New York and Erie Railroad (NY&E) relocated its shops facilities from Dunkirk, New York, to Buffalo in 1869, Dunkirk lost its largest employer. Coming to the city's rescue was Horatio G. Brooks (1828–1887), the former chief engineer of the NY&E who was at the controls of the first train into Dunkirk in 1851. In 1869, Brooks leased the Dunkirk shops facility from the NY&E and formed the Brooks Locomotive Works. The new company officially opened on November 11, 1869. The company's first steam locomotive is completed the following month as part of an order for the NY&E, the company's first customer.
Within a couple of years of its opening, Brooks was producing as many as seven new locomotives per month, compared to one per month while the facility was controlled by the NY&E. Brooks built locomotives for nearly all of the major railroads of the time, producing 37 new locomotives in its first year and 43 new locomotives in its second year of operations.
After the financial crisis of 1873, orders for new equipment dropped off, but Brooks was able to recover enough business to avoid bankruptcy. Brooks locomotives were displayed a few years later at the National Railway Appliance Exhibition in Chicago, where they were judged the Best in Show.
The 1890s brought another period of depressed sales following another financial crisis. The company produced 226 new locomotives in 1891, but only 90 new locomotives in 1894. Brooks was not able to recover business as easily and the company was merged with several other manufacturers in 1901 to form the American Locomotive Company. ALCO produced locomotives at this facility until 1934 when the shop was renamed ALCO Thermal Products Division. Locomotives produced at the former Brooks plant after ALCO's formation came to be known as ALCO-Brooks locomotives.
Although new locomotives were no longer being produced at the former Brooks shops in Dunkirk, shop forces were kept busy for some time building spare parts for ALCO locomotives. Production had shifted from locomotives to heat exchangers, high-pressure vessels and pipes of all sizes.
After World War II, production at the Dunkirk plant never got back to its prewar levels. ALCO finally closed the facility in 1962.
Read more about this topic: Brooks Locomotive Works
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)