(Bloomberg News circulated the following on May 12, 2011.)
NEW YORK — General Electric Co. (GE) plans to open a locomotive plant employing more than 500 people in Fort Worth, Texas, the hometown of Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe, as demand rises for railroad shipments.
GE Transportation will invest as much as $96 million at the first U.S. factory outside its Erie, Pennsylvania, base in more than a century. That hiring and 250 new jobs in Erie will push the unit’s global workforce to about 10,000 employees, said Lorenzo Simonelli, the business’s chief executive officer.
Expanding into Texas gives GE Transportation a manufacturing base in the state with the most railroad route miles in the U.S. Texas is served chiefly by Union Pacific Corp. (UNP), whose Union Pacific Railroad is the nation’s biggest by sales, and Burlington Northern, owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Full story: www.bloomberg.com