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Re: Very topical comment on "Buy American" from hsr blog site
Author: mook
Date: 12-17-2010 - 16:54
On the other hand...
Name me one (just one) company other than Siemens that can build an off-the-shelf rail transit vehicle essentially completely in the US that resembles an off-the-shelf product (which I define as something that looks and runs the same for all orders, with mainly cosmetic differences)? As far as I know, outside of the faux-vintage-trolley business, they're it; everybody else is a false-front operation (to be abandoned as soon as the current orders are filled -- so much for the "good jobs" suckers and good luck maintaining those orphans at the transit lines they end up on) or, at best, an assembly point for components made elsewhere. Now name me one (just one) rail transit (or even bus, these days) maker that is OWNED AND OPERATED in the US -- in the rail business (with the possible exception of GE and Boise in the locomotive market) there aren't any, and in the bus business you have to look really hard.
The process described in the original post is unfortunate but is also typical of a 3rd-world country that can't make stuff on its own (in our case because we shipped the knowledge and the factories overseas for cheaper labor and dumped the local labor on the unemployment board). So unless you can figure out a way to do PCCs again (and even those were really just semi-custom not off-the-shelf), and find a way to de-emphasize Wall Street profit (Right Now, or at latest next quarter) expectations in corporate governance and for that matter Government, good luck with changing the Consultant Culture.
Name me one (just one) company other than Siemens that can build an off-the-shelf rail transit vehicle essentially completely in the US that resembles an off-the-shelf product (which I define as something that looks and runs the same for all orders, with mainly cosmetic differences)? As far as I know, outside of the faux-vintage-trolley business, they're it; everybody else is a false-front operation (to be abandoned as soon as the current orders are filled -- so much for the "good jobs" suckers and good luck maintaining those orphans at the transit lines they end up on) or, at best, an assembly point for components made elsewhere. Now name me one (just one) rail transit (or even bus, these days) maker that is OWNED AND OPERATED in the US -- in the rail business (with the possible exception of GE and Boise in the locomotive market) there aren't any, and in the bus business you have to look really hard.
The process described in the original post is unfortunate but is also typical of a 3rd-world country that can't make stuff on its own (in our case because we shipped the knowledge and the factories overseas for cheaper labor and dumped the local labor on the unemployment board). So unless you can figure out a way to do PCCs again (and even those were really just semi-custom not off-the-shelf), and find a way to de-emphasize Wall Street profit (Right Now, or at latest next quarter) expectations in corporate governance and for that matter Government, good luck with changing the Consultant Culture.
