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:
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)