End of An Era
By the mid 1980s, due to high labor and manufacturing costs and low demand for new utility-scale turbines, both CTSD and STSD laid-off a large percentage of their personnel in the Philadelphia area and moved their engineering and marketing functions to a new facility in Orlando, Florida.
Turbine manufacturing was outsourced under a licensing agreement to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), and the historic Westinghouse Lester site closed for good. However, the property was later developed into a multi-use industrial park, which is home to a variety of tenants that contribute significantly to Tinicum’s economy and help offset the loss of Westinghouse.
Shortly thereafter, when efforts to operate the gas turbine development lab on a contract basis for the military proved fruitless, the CTSD Concordville site also closed and both buildings were subsequently razed.
Read more about this topic: Westinghouse Combustion Turbine Systems Division
Famous quotes containing the word era:
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)