"General Electric's Secret Boot Camp"

[MEC407]

When you think of hotspots for grooming corporate leaders, the bustling skyscrapers of Manhattan or the sprawling office parks of Los Angeles easily come to mind. But Erie, Pennsylvania? That's right. Turns out, the mid-sized industrial town marked by squat factories and windowless pubs is ground zero for some of corporate America's fast-rising stars.

Read the rest at:

http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/24/news/co ... 2007092511

[Allen Hazen]

Hmmm... In-house school (Crotonville) for developing the talents of their employees, and who do they name it for? Neutron Jack. Life's little ironies.

Maybe the business plan only involves education and training and nurturing of talent at the top end: seems to me I recall that GE-Erie a few years back dropped an apprenticeship program that had been in place training local young people to be GETS employees?

(Sorry: must have gotten up on the cynical side of the bed this morning. Thanks for posting the link, MEC 407. GE ***does*** have a longstanding reputation for skillful and imaginative management, and a number of its highest-flying executive superstars have passed through GETS over the years.)

--

And did the "Fortune" journalist-- "Fortune" being a business rag, not a techie magazine-- garble the description of the "Hybrid" locomotive a bit?

[MEC407]

The writer mentions that the hybrid loco can harness the power of hundreds of railcars to boost efficiency. I guess that is a basically accurate description of how the locomotive will take the electricity generated by dynamic braking and store it in batteries. Where it gets confusing is when the writer goes on to say that the loco has been so popular overseas that it now accounts for a third of GETS' sales. I think he meant GE locos in general, not the hybrid loco.

[Engineer Spike]

I want to see how these hybrid units work. I can just see cheap management running a 100 cars with 1 unit, on a flat line. Now how are the batteries going to stay charged? Will the small prime mover be up to the job?

[LCJ]

Batteries are charged by using dynamic brake, I believe.

With present technology, fully charged batteries will be able to provide propulsion effort for only about 30 minutes.

[jgallaway81]

From the different sources I've read & talked to, I've gathered that the engine will still have a 4,000hp diesel genset...

With fully charged batteries, the system will draw 2000hp from the diesel, and 2000hp from the batteries...

Now, this setup may have changed from the last time I read about the system.