The Rise and Fall of Fairbanks Morse Pumps,The Same Company That Made Engines And Locomotive Drivers

The Rise and Fall of Fairbanks Morse — The Company That Built Submarines, Locomotives, and Pumps In 1823, a man named Thaddeus Fairbanks opened a small ironworks in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He was trying to build a more accurate weighing scale. What followed was one of the most remarkable industrial stories in American history. Over the next 135 years, Fairbanks Morse grew from a scale manufacturer into a company that supplied pumps to cities, engines to the U.S. Navy, and locomotives to American railroads. During World War II, the company ranked 60th among all U.S. corporations in military production contracts — powering a significant portion of the Navy's submarine fleet with an engine so reliable it is still in production today, 86 years later. But by 1988, the original company was gone. The pump division had been sold. The scale division had been sold. The locomotive program had ended 25 years earlier after producing just 1,460 units against a market dominated by General Motors. A family feud in 1956, a hostile acquisition in 1958, and a conglomerate that renamed the company twice in six years had dismantled one of America's greatest industrial manufacturers piece by piece. This video covers the full story — from the platform scale patent of 1832, to the opposed-piston submarine engine of 1938, to the Train Master locomotive of 1953, to the corporate breakup that split one company into three. We look at what went wrong with the locomotive program, why the same engine that worked perfectly in a submarine failed repeatedly in railroad service, and what ultimately happened to each division after the original company ceased to exist. Today, three separate companies carry the Fairbanks name. None of them is the original. All of them still trace their products back to that ironworks in Vermont.